Conversation between two readers of the blog. One. relatively clueless and the other, in italics, a little more aware.

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He's going to subject me to these again? 

Yes, he just did them.

Why would he do that?

Guy thinks he's got a hold of something, probably.

I wonder what he's thinking?

Maybe we should read what he's got on his mind.

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I know, I just did these and then I just posted about them. Well, I've spent the past few days printing them and they have opened a few doors for me, so I thought I would share whatever perceptions I have about them.

First, an important point, hopefully one that is relevant for you too. This is something fairly new in the medium's  history, I believe. I don't think we know much about the pictures we make when we make them. I hope you can follow my logic here. It is partly due to the fact that we are making more pictures now without cost or hindrance (in this our digital world). It is also partly that the devices we use to capture our pictures can be capable of truly astounding quality; meaning detail, subtlety, dynamic range, color depth, ability to make large prints, etc. What does all that mean? That, for the most part in the consumer photo world, pictures are made all the time with no idea of what's really contained in them. In the world I inhabit, the high-end world of "photo as art" presumably the final image is in print form and it is of  high quality, with lots of detail, faithfully rendered in all its amazing subtlety. Do I know the picture when I take it? No, not completely. I think I come to terms with my pictures when they become prints.

Back to the subject here which is us taking another look at these:

which were introduced previously here. These ones, showing a chopped up side of a building like some collage, or mosaic, are the core pictures of the series and are what I've been leading up to with the preceding "pipe" pictures.

The series starts with this photograph used on the title page:

A hopeless, leaning-over-too-wide-a-lens-photograph. But it isn't really part of the series. What it is, is a map of the overall wall we are about to see broken down into pieces like a puzzle. I know what you're thinking: jigsaw puzzle box cover. Right? Yes, that's exactly what it is. This image of the whole wall, hopelessly distorted though it may be, is the guide to the pictures about to ensue. So, somehow, all the following 15 or so pictures in the series come from this one wall. With some being shot closer, some overlapping others, one even going vertical and rendered as a 35 x 24 inch print, composited from multiple frames:

So what's my intent? To dissemble and restructure our understanding of something by looking at its composite parts. Isn't this really what photography does? Make analogies and metaphors to larger things and issues? It takes a small slice of something and allows larger and more universal stuff to flow out.

So, if I can build a framework around the series it is this: the earlier ones (as in the two above) are contained by this stupid pipe that runs through them. This is my way of telling you that they are connected, that no image here rests on its own, that they relate to each other, not literally as I've framed them in a discontinuous way, but that one precedes the other, or that one follows another and so on. This then gives you a process by which you can begin to form an understanding of a pattern that would make up a whole in the next ones, which don't give you this guide of a pipe going through them. Make sense? I hope so.

Back to my original point. What did I know when I took the pictures? Well, honestly, not everything. I "learned" the pictures while I was printing them. This is another reason I believe in the follow through that is printing our pictures. Don't print and you don't know. Simple enough.

This finishes my breakdown of the dissembled series called "The Wall".

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Ok. So now I've read it.

Does it make sense?

Well, certainly more than it did before. It did make me realize that there can be a lot more to pictures than just what they look like at first glance.

I think probably part of his point is that we all should be looking at things maybe a little harder, particularly when they are rendered beautifully and presented on a gallery wall.

Man, I can't wait to see the prints of these now that I've read all this stuff about them.

Well, he shows at 555 Gallery in Boston. I bet he's got the prints there.

I think I read somewhere that he's going away again and he is leaving these and some other portfolios behind at the gallery so that people can come in to see the work.

Guy gets to travel, doesn't he?

Yeah, and they all seem to be these photo trips he takes. Wish I could do that.

Heh, do you know the works of Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline, Piet Mondrian, Ellsworth Kelley and Aaron Siskind?

No, never heard of them. Rock band or something?

No, not so much. Forget I asked.

Ok.

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The Wall pictures are new, as of June 2014. They are from Chelsea, MA. 

These are in sequence.

Think they're good. 

Wonder if you do.

Try these on:

First one just a placeholder, to orient you where I am shooting, not intended to be part of series. Will serve as thumbnail on title page like so:

Series starts here. There is some correction for convergence.

The ones with the pipe in them, the five below, run to six in the full portfolio. The pipe is the visual device intended to provide continuity through this sub group and need to be hung left to right in a single row.

But the pipe pictures really serve as the preamble to the core of the series which is these next three:

of which there are six in the printed portfolio (I have to hold something back), then to begin to finish here with the roughly center framed door.

Then to the last one, which is the only one that lets you out, the idea being that the negative space of the sky becomes surface much like those in some of the earlier ones that have panels that were also light blue.

And finally, there is a bit of  back story. There always is.The day I shot these I loaded up my bike on the top of my car, drove over the Tobin Bridge, parked in an empty lot in Chelsea and rode throughout the city until I stopped here to make these pictures. After I did these I rode down by the water and made another series (that I am working on now). I rode back to my car to put the bike back on the car and walked over to Mystic Brewery, where I tasted a couple of very fine beers and took the tour of the brewery.

My idea of heaven on earth in a day.

How old are you? Are you American? 

If you're a certain age, over maybe 40 or so, brought up in the USA, you do know what this was. Ho Jo's was Howard Johnson's, one of the first real franchise operation in the US and very popular before McDonald's took over. By the 60's it had morphed into Howard Johnson's Motor Lodge.

Amazon has a good decription:

Howard Johnson created an orange-roofed empire of ice cream stands and restaurants that stretched from Maine to Florida and all the way to the West Coast. Popularly known as the "Father of the Franchise Industry," Johnson delivered good food and prices that brought appreciative customers back for more. The attractive white Colonial Revival restaurants, with eye-catching porcelain tile roofs, illuminated cupolas and sea blue shutters, were described in Reader's Digest in 1949 as the epitome of "eating places that look like New England town meeting houses dressed up for Sunday." Boston historian and author Anthony M. Sammarco recounts how Howard Johnson introduced twenty-eight flavors of ice cream, the "Tendersweet" clam strips, grilled frankforts and a menu of delicious and traditional foods that families eagerly enjoyed when they traveled.

This serves as the introduction to the book: 

A History of Howard Johnson's: How a Massachusetts Soda Fountain Became an American Icon (American Palate) Paperback

by Anthony Mitchell Sammarco

Now, they are gone or are derelict.

I found this one outside of Princeton, NJ on Route 1. Sad ending to a business made for a different time, a different America.

This one in particular had been a travel agency after it was no longer a HoJo's. That failed too, evidently. This one had a motel too-a Howard Johnson's Motor Lodge.

I can't help but think of the history contained here; the family with two kids arriving in the summer, sandy feet from the day at the beach, checking in, parking in front of their room for the night, kids excited, the station wagon loaded up with luggage and blow-up plastic pool toys. Or, during a snow storm in the winter, the illicit hook up with the married car salesman and the counter girl who works at the diner meeting here for a one night stand. Or the long haul trucker, maxed out on caffeine booking in mid week late at night, exhausted. Or the young PHD, flying in from the West Coast and checking in for one night as he has an interview first thing the next morning at Princeton for a job he will not get to teach English. Or finally, a Gary Winogrand or a Robert Frank or a Lee Friedlander needing a place to crash after a long day of driving and photographing, road warriors of a specula ilk, hard core recorders of a very different America in the  60's and 70's.

Photograph of Lee Friedlander by Lee Friedlander, 1960

This a series? Will I make this into a portfolio of prints to be shown to curators and galleries? I have no idea, yet. I often need time to figure things like this out. I need to look at what I've done for a bit and put some distance between the work and when I did it. Maybe I need to go back, or maybe it needs to be in black and white (a real possibility). What determines success or not for me? Whether I've connected with the place, whether there is an emotional bond, a sympathy or empathy for the place I've shot. Simple enough. Then, in this connection I feel, have I been able to get this across through the pictures I make? 

I've written this before but there are many new subscribers so I will repeat it here. For the most part, writing a blog is a one way process. I acknowledge and accept that. But you can respond via email (Neal's email) if you like. I will appreciate your thoughts on this new work. Furthermore, I will not respond to your email unless you ask questions, for I respect your privacy. But if you do email your reactions, I thank you.

Last week I went down to Martha's Vineyard for a couple of days after returning from North Carolina. I went to see Steinunn and Finur, my two hosts at the Baer Art Center in Iceland last summer, where I was an artist in residence. They had come to the Vineyard to experience it and were staying in a rental home not far from the airport. We had a couple of dinners together. It was wonderful to see them and to meet more of their family as well.

While waiting to board the ferry to the island in Woods Hole, I saw that that there were many antique cars waiting as well. They were from a MASS Antique Auto Club and were headed to an Oak Bluffs hotel  for the weekend. I didn't think much of it, except to say to myself, "might be good to go over there and check it out if you have time."

The weather was terrible the whole time I was on the island, gray and wet. This  turned out for the best as the day I was leaving I did drive over to Oak Bluffs in the early morning to see the cars. It was one of those summer mornings where the air isn't moving and everything is dripping wet. I got the camera out of the back of the car and it had the long lens on it, the same one I'd used for most of  the Monsters pictures. Switch to a shorter lens? Put the camera on a tripod? No and no. A fateful decision but a good one, as it turned out. In sunlight these immaculately restored automobiles would be the same old same old but wet from the night's rain... well, you tell me:

Pity you can't see the prints as they are freaking amazing! (modest aren't I?) But seriously: flat light, a very sharp long lens and these beautiful surfaces covered with a mosaic of water drops and painted these super rich colors...well, no hyperbole here but, really.

(These two, one above and one below, are with sincere apologies to my friend Elizabeth Ellenwood as she shoots wires and may believe that wires are her domain.)

Once again, if you look at these on your smart phone only you should be arrested by the "Image Quality Police" or, at least, fined.

I sense a little cynicism here, a little reticence to endorse these pictures and the second great coming that they truly are. Well, you can't really make an informed decision by just looking at them at 72dpi online, can you?

Want to see the real prints, the ones that I am saying are FREAKIN' AMAZING? If you're local, call up 555 Gallery (857-496-7234) and tell them you want Rantoul's new Car pictures there ASAP, please, and we will make that happen. I mean it. If you're not local to the Boston area, then plan a trip soon as you simply have to see these to believe them. If you don't get to see these prints it is simply your loss.

There. Done.

On the site new pictures made while teaching at Penland School of Crafts in North Carolina. Taken in Spruce Pine every morning before class:

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