I know I don't post here so much these days. I guess my head's in a different space.

But I do have a brief observation to share with you that you might find helpful. I have been going through past years files, specifically 2009. That was the year I was on sabbatical leave from teaching at Northeastern. I spent most the of the fall in Italy photographing. So, I've been going through those files, which were originally stored and edited in Apple's Aperture, then later converted and run into Lightroom after Apple no longer supported Aperture (thanks Apple).

Trieste, 2009 ©Neal Rantoul

It's difficult work going though so many files. It's numbing and tends to make me want to go to sleep (whether that's a comment on how boring my pictures are is not for me to say). I need to take frequent breaks and reapproach later fresh of mind and spirit. 

But my point is this: we all have made compromises in the gear we use because we're not able to afford the best. However, in this case, I was sufficiently along in my career and secure enough in my job that I could afford the best at the time I was working. So this work from Italy I made in 2009 still holds up today qualitatively. I am thankful for that.

Italy 2009 ©NEAL RANTOUL

In those years I was using a Nikon D3x, a 24 MP full frame camera that was  expensive but that made gorgeous files. Too big and too expensive ($8000) it was a camera that I grew to love as it never failed and made pictures that hold their own  compared to anything I have done either before or after.

This includes lenses. I had some very good glass in those years as well.  Notable was the Nikon 14-24mm f2.8, a huge unwieldily thing that was as good as the 38mm Biogon I'd used for years on the Superwide (Hasselblad). Added to my kit were the 24-70mm f 2.8 and the 70-200 mm f2.8 Nikons. Perhaps not up to present day standards but good enough and state of the art in their time.

If you are a career photographer it makes sense to work with the best equipment  you can. This for today as you make pictures, but for tomorrow as well, as quickly new work becomes past work and sits in a library of imagery you can't know now is important or not. Going through these pictures I made 15 years ago makes me grateful for the sacrifices I made back then to work with top gear for I can't fault the results.

Sistiana Mare, Italy © NEAL RANTOUL

Ever feel you were in a place that was somehow magical? That, for whatever reason, things colluded to make where you were something so very special as to be once in a lifetime? I am sure you have.

Orvieto, Italy 2009

Ever happen to be there with a camera? Were you able to capture that special circumstance? Take advantage of this gift? I am sure you have.

Arsenale, Venice, Italy 2007

I know I have. There is the sense of tread lightly here and speak in whispers as this is so incredible you could shatter it in an instant. That feeling of OMG I just have to get this, all I have to do with this camera in my hands is to bear witness to this beauty, this sublime place, this other worldly quality. This is both a powerful concept, to be able to make something truly sublime out of what is in front of you, and humbling for it is such a transient thing, this picture you are making.

Oakesdale Cemetery, Washington 1997

Isn't it this at least part of what we seek? It is often what we are looking for as artists reliant upon the world around us to make our pictures. To find a circumstance, a unique combination of weather, place, light and use of a creative frame of mind that will combine together something perhaps mundane into something truly extraordinary. Very empowering, this. The feeling that it may be put there for you, arranged and choreographed as a display for you to photograph. Odd, yes?

Bermuda 1982

Two things: one, you can't have this "ah ha" moment, this ultimate reward, without being out there with a camera, a lot. You need to be in the world, seeing, looking, being a photo predator, on the "hunt" for pictures. Two, experience should be your guide, your practically instinctual director of future success. This is where your intellect is effectively useless, perhaps for logisitcs only, for it is your intuition, your heart, that will lead you down that path, over that rise, around that corner to find the sublime, the magical.

Vignole, Italy 2006

I am most fortunate to have had this kind of experience numerous times over my career. I can't assume it or take it for granted but I can be thankful when it comes and accept it for the gift it is.  

Italy, 1990 near Duino along the Adriatic

These photographs seem like they are from another time, another life.

You get so old you can't believe that was you 30 or 40 years ago. The reason for this retrospection? 

I've been scanning old negatives. 

It's brought me back to the 80's and 90's when I was a full-time professor and an 8 x 10 photographer.

1986 near Prescott, AZ with the Toyo Filed 8 x 10

8 x 10 photographer? Yes, this was an "identifier", a title to a certain way of photographing. To be an 8 x 10 photographer tended to mean you were someone who was very serious about your pictures, someone disciplined and something of a control freak. You needed to work clean (because of dust), most needed to have things like an 8 x 10 enlarger (often mounted on its own concrete pad to minimize vibration) and huge lenses that were very slow and very expensive, a heavy tripod and a dark cloth that you'd drape over your head when composing your picture.

I've been looking at work from Italy where I would teach most summers near Trieste or north of Rome in Viterbo. Summer after summer, a frantic pace of classes and shooting trips, weekends on my own in a rented car driving all over with the 8 x 10. Hundreds of sheets of black and white film shot each summer, spending months back in my darkroom just processing the film, often finding it would be February or March before I started to print.

Marble Quarry at Cava Romana, 1992

Years of this, not even thinking that this was a massive amount of work, not caring, for I loved it so. I am not sure this way of working would be possible today, with airport security being so tight and x-raying being so pervasive.

Tuba, near Trieste 1991

Tarquinia, 1992

By the early 90's, 8 x 10 was a greased system for me, practically the only thing I shot. Fluid and frequent with it as if it were something handheld or for any kind of photography. I'd just as soon haul it out to shoot a class picture at my daughter's school as I would to make a grand landscape on the edge of a cliff at Les Baux in Southern France. It was just the tool I used to make my pictures.  Ed Ranney from Santa Fe is a friend who was like this with a 5 x 7 or a 4 x 5 and I admired his work, so emulated his approach. He was fast and easy, no fuss, make the picure and move on. Likewise with Emmet Gowin. I liked his Italian garden pictures from the 70's and, yes, pointed down at gardens in Italy when I could, just like he did.

Near Viterbo, 1994

A new road under construction near Muggia, 1993

What was it about this format? The negatives contained so much sheer information that one never had to think about whether it would get that or if it could render that with subtlety and refinement. I never thought twice about making big prints from those negatives, and did. For a while 20 x 24 inches was a common size for me and I made many prints that were 5 feet across. In fact, I was proud of my craft for it was very difficult to be good with this large camera. I worked at my own development as well, researching and trying different films and developers, staining my negatives in Pyro for years, toning my prints in Selenium or more exotic metals, including gold. 

The craft was intertwined with the final print, the imagery integral to the process. 

What I photographed was in full knowledge of what that image could become as a beautiful print.

But, and it is a big but....

This is the truth and the real point of this post: No one but me knows this work, no one but me cares to see them, as prints or here in the blog. Nothing will happen to this work unless I make it happen and no one will choose to scan them when I am gone. They will have existed as physical negatives made in the late 20th century and then they will not. No one will know how to edit them and no one will care to do anything with them.

Near the coast at Tarquinia 1992

In present times, photographs can't exist unless they are digitized. I can't show these pictures to you in this form without scanning the negatives or prints first. I can't submit this work for exhibition or a grant, I can't share them without first making them into O's and 1's using a sensor. 

8 x 10. A few still use one. Bruce Myren locally to the Boston area does good work with one. Mercedes Jelinek and Liz Ellenwood, young photographers that use my old camera. Sally Mann I presume. Don't know if Emmet still uses his. 

Let's move up into more recent times. Since I finished teaching in Venice I've been to Italy a few times: 2009, 2012, 2014. The 2009 trip was photo specific and produced some wonderful work.

In 2012 I was able to get back to the area around Latisana not far from Trieste to photograph stands of trees. The trees are grown as a crop and are for making wood pulp.

And in 2014 on a trip to both France for  Paris Photo and to Italy I made pictures in Noli, along the Italian Mediterranean

This ends the series of several posts on my time teaching and photographing in Italy. There is far more than I've represented here. I linked a few series at the bottom of this post. Very often series represented in the gallery page on the site are backed up with blogs about the same series. Easy, just go to the search function in the blog and type in the series and a list of posts will populate on the left side of the page.

Thanks for following along. 

Finally, I feel blessed to have had so many opportunities to photograph in such an incredible country as Italy for so many years. I am the beneficiary of its warmth, its wonderful people, and its beauty.

I sometimes feel as though I've spent my whole adult life photographing in Italy.

Of course, that's not true, but over many many trips to photograph and to teach in the summers, Italy has been a base, a foundation of creative output for me since very early days. I don't know the whole country, having never been to the south, but north of Rome, I know well, with many pictures the result. Viterbo, Duino near Trieste, Venice,  Luca, and northern Italy? Feel like home.

These were places I was teaching summer semesters abroad for various schools, until I created a program in Venice with Holly Smith Pedlosky for Northeastern University to teach a Summer 1 photography course in 2007. I stopped after 3 years but the prgram continued for the next 10.

Much of my time photographing in Italy was spent working in black and white with the  8 x 10 camera. This was mostly in the 90's:

Those summers I taught 5 days a week with Friday afternoon crits.That meant  I had the weekends free. I'd load up the 8 x 10 and off I'd go in some tiny Italian rental car, free to roam, to look and to photograph.

Often I'd have a teaching assistant along with me or a student or two, but many times it was just going off on my own. Each evening I would unload the exposed film in a closet or dark room into empty film boxes. These I would bring back to the States with me at the end of my time in Europe and begin to develop the film. 4 sheets at a time in 11 x 14-inch trays in total darkness, day in and day out. There were years where it would take me 4 or 5 months just to develop the film. 

I've written this before but I didn't really think much about how difficult all this was, how labor intensive, expensive and heavy the gear was. It was the way I made my pictures, simple enough. If I wanted to photograph something, well, out came the big camera.

Next up, in Italy 2 we'll take a look at the early 2000's when I started photographing digitally, leaving the 8 x 10 behind.