Marc Meyer? Yes. Never heard of him? That's all right. You will know his work soon. I am going to show this young photographer's work for this post as I am struck by the strength of these pictures. I hope you'll let me know what you think.

Here's Marc's bio and artist statement:

Marc S. Meyer

Marc photographs throughout Europe and the United States. His work is characterized by its use of strong design elements combined with an acute sense of color.

Marc was born in Germany in 1987 and his family moved to Tulsa, OK when he was very little. Marc’s two sisters and three brothers were educated in the US through high school. Marc then studied art and photography at the Kansas City Art Institute, receiving his master’s degree in 2009.

Since then Marc has been working (barista, auto mechanic, waiter and now designer for a small web based startup company), traveling and photographing. Marc and his wife live near Baltimore, MD and have one child, a boy.

These pictures were made on a sunny afternoon in late September 2014 on Chappaquidick, a small island reached by taking a two-car ferry from Edgartown on Martha’s Vineyard.

Marc writes about the work:

Beach Club

My wife and son and I were on vacation. It was the first time we’d been to Martha’s Vineyard. We’d heard about it over the years due to Obama’s going there. We were staying in Edgartown and I told my wife, Theresa, that I was going to take off for a few hours to photograph. Walking around town I came across a ferry shuttling people and cars back and forth. I asked where it took them and was told “to Chappy”. I asked how much it cost to go and return, paid and rode the ferry across the cut in the harbor. When I arrived, there wasn’t much there but a single road. I walked along the road and the first thing I came across was the Edgartown Beach Club. I photographed there for a couple of hours, walked back to the ferry and rode it back to Edgartown.
I hoped to convey a sense of this place off season, free from all the activity that takes place during the summer. I was struck by the light, the forms created by the space and the colors.
I hope you like my pictures.

Beach Club:

The pictures are bold. I would even say: in your face. The guy has great design integrity, though. Not much color to start out. He works in sequenced series. In other words, this is a body of work we're seeing here, not just a collection of images. We've seen #'s 1, 2, 3.

Hard to get him to talk about them, meaning, I assume, that they are close to him. But he'll let a few things loose as we meet up to go over this work.

He talked about the required focus he needs to pull off a series like this. This is Marc working pretty hard, over just a couple of hours, nervous the whole time as he was trespassing.

He uses the "no trespassing" sign as the cover for the series.

I think these are inherently coherent visual statements.  Simple really, but complex when you work at them a little, as there seem to me to be about 6 emotional states throughout the group. I think they reside in some highly purified air of the guy's aesthetic. He cuts through a lot, which is much appreciated. I love the ones that do color.

He's one reductive SOB, though isn't he? They make a Robert Frank image from "The Americans" look positively complex. But hugely appropriate in this week where we've just heard about the death of Lewis Baltz, at 69. Marc talked to me about seeing "New Industrial Parks Near Irvine, California" for the first time when he was a student and how they shook his world. 

Clearly.

One of the things that strikes me about this work is its remarkable maturity, as though someone far older and more experienced made them. In-person, Marc exudes rationality, reason, and a steady pace. This comes through in the pictures in their sure-footedness. Placement is considered and known here. I asked him about the focal length of the lens he used. He smiled and said, "it's wide". That's all I got but I'd be willing to bet he feels the lens's extreme width is an integral part of the group of pictures.

I like his sense of humor:

Evidently, he was discovering the beach club while he was photographing it. Got that? Yes, he hadn't walked it before he'd shot it. He walked it AS he shot it! Imagine. The guy's good, yes, but his confidence is big too.

So here's a discovery he made

as he came around the corner to the backside of the club. This last one is now referred to in the Meyer family as "Dad's Dinosaur Bones Graveyard Picture."

Does he know when he's making good work? Yes, I think he does. I know he's very excited when he's working this way. Here he's flipped the banality of the place and the off-season time of year right over and made the place like a set or a perfect park, ready and prepared for him to photograph it. Like it's been staged. Quite the frame of mind. Marc says that's where he has to go or the pictures don't come outright. Attributing great significance to the passed by and passed over is nothing new, of course,  but this series proves the tactic's efficacy.

He ends:

with subtle shifts into grays, muted yellows, ochres and light browns. What a palette. I have to be careful here as I could be a little jealous.

And then really ends with:

I presume because there is some vestige of the previous season remaining in this toy shovel that was left behind as a 4-year-old little girl heard her mom yelling, "Lisa you get over here right now, this instant!" on the last hot day of summer in early September before packing up to return home to the mainland. 

It is also fitting that Marc ends with this pink shovel, as the first photograph in the series includes it:

this being a crop of the first picture:

This is textbook Marc Meyers, thinking of these two pictures as bookends to what is contained within the body of the series.

That pink shovel, fixed right there through the future of fall rains and winter snows, storms, and mid-February starry nights with the temperature in the single numbers making everything crisp, sharp, and still. Wet from April showers and dark sand, to be picked up early in the season in May when the college kids come in to clean up the place to get it ready to open next June.

Marc Meyer is hoping to show these pictures to Susan Nalband at 555 Gallery in Boston as he has selected 555 as the gallery he most hopes will pick up his work. 555 Gallery is the best new photography gallery in Boston.

Interested in his work? Want to see the prints? 

contact me at: nrantoul@comcast.net

In Tom's Neck 1 and Tom's Neck 2 we looked at a new set of pictures I made a few weeks ago on the island of Chappaquidick, off of Martha's Vineyard, MA.

In this post, we'll finish the Tom's Neck series.

But before we conclude, I also worked to extend from some of the "facade" ideas, to lend to the depth of the project but also to allow some actual depth (foreground to background) into the pictures as well.

I did that by beaching the boat, getting out and photographing conventionally, both with the moderate wide angle lens I'd already been using, but with a longer lens as well.

I was seeking to  convey a greater immersion into the landscape, as opposed to sitting outside of it and photographing like an observer.

I also used files shot aerially that gave a broader perspective on the area from a different angle:

When photographing aerially it becomes hugely important to "get it all". This simply means to circle areas that are crucial, to photograph them with front light and back light too, as reshoots are almost always not possible.

As I headed farther down the inlet that is Tom's Neck in the kayak I was confronted with a choice. I could go down to the very end where there is a sandy beach and a point:

or contain the series within the framework I'd already established. I chose the latter.

I know, if you've followed along and are invested you may be saying, "Neal, you idiot! What were you thinking?"and I will have to live with that. My reasoning was that the series was beginning to head off into something different and would therefore dilute the impact and cohesion of the other pictures. I was already doing quite a bit in a group of pictures: telling a story, representing a finite area with pictures taken weeks apart, from the air and from a boat. Let me show you what I did conclude with. After making several more like this:

and

I paddled across the inlet to get more distance from the Neck than before:

and

Then, for the last picture, paddled back across the inlet to turn the boat around 180 degrees on what I'd been photographing, putting Tom's Neck at my back, and made this picture:

For the first time we are seeing what else was out there. This isn't that unusual a thing for me to do at the end of a highly sequenced series, where I tell a story or take us on a journey. It is also structurally similar to the first in that it is three horizontal bands. 

For the sake of the blog I can show you what all this is:

(Thanks  to Google Maps)

The red X marks about where I made the last picture from. You can also clearly see where I had worked for all of these pictures, from the Dike Bridge at the bottom of the map all the way up to Tom's Neck Point.

The last photograph is the image that intends to lead the way out, or to another place or perhaps another series over the horizon, yet to come. What's on the other side of that spit of sand, beyond those bushes? 

So that is the new series of pictures I made above and in the water of Tom's Neck  on Chappaquidick Island.

I hope you like them. It is not hard to let me know what you think: Neal's Email

BTW: I leave for Paris in a couple of days. When I get there I will drive down to northern Italy to stay with friends, then drive back for Paris Photo the middle of the month. I plan on posting while away. Hope you can come along for the ride. Will I photograph? Is the sky blue?

Thanks for reading.

In the first post (here) on this new series of pictures we looked at the written introduction and the few pictures that set the stage for the subsequent photographs. Now we'll be getting into the main body of these pictures.

Before we get there, I need to make this point: I knew, before I was going to make these pictures, that I was on to something important for me. While I can't say that they will be seen as important photographs by others I can say that I knew these these pictures would move me ahead as an artist, that, if I didn't screw them up, I was about to make real "work". Not try, hope for, aspire towards, or presume but to make work that would stand as fundamental within my oeuvre. 

As I paddled down the length of Tom's Neck that day I came across several variations on a theme.

I used all these pictures and their formats throughout the series. A word about the prints: they are 21 x 14 inches printed on 22 x 17 Canson Photographique Baryta paper. 

I also made a few that referenced where I was, such as:

That little building is the entrance to the Cape Pogue National Wildlife Refuge, where you can, with a permit and a four wheel drive vehicle, drive along the beach at the end of the island.

As you work your way through the Tom's Neck series of pictures, every third or fourth print does this:

which, in effect, provides you with a map to what is is being presented in the pictures taken from the kayak.

But also notice that your perception of the area is drastically altered by the inclusion of the aerials. There are many elements seen in the aerials that are not even considered or thought of in the pictures made from the water. Such as: ponds, fields, layers of trees and a rich landscape beyond the "front" or "facade" seen from the boat. This is one of the key points of the series for me; that our understanding of an area or region is altered by our perspective on it. I know, very obvious. But not so obvious when drawn out for us in pictures that show us just how powerful those differences are. 

The analogy for me is the old American western towns with false fronts on their buildings, made to look more significant and substantial than they really were.

This from Old Trail Town, Cody, Wyoming, a set of pictures I made in 2004 (here).

You can almost look at these pictures made from the kayak as two dimensional, flat and planal:

But I didn't just stick with that one point or idea. I was trying to make a variety of pictures too, to maintain my interest and the viewers as well, but also to broaden and deepen the set. I also needed to deal with the idea of how do I end this.

In Tom's Neck 3 we will do just that.

Stay tuned.

Laurie Anderson sings "days go by" in a powerful refrain in the song "White Lilly". Nothing could be more true when spending time in the wonderful island called Martha's Vineyard.

This 25 mile long island off the coast of Massachusetts is its own world, of course. Anytime you spend time on an island the mainland fades away. Spend three straight weeks here and you have an isolation that not only has you forgetting about traffic jams, the hectic pace in the city and deadlines but also the world outside the island  all together. 

With a constant flow of house guests and driving them to and from the ferry, trips to town to shop for food, hikes on the beach and on inland trails, long discussions after a meal sitting at the dining room table or clearing space to look at a box of photographs, time seems suspended in a never ending cycle of days that "go by" one after the other in a sort of blissful haze of activity that is fast paced but where they all blend together too, different but the same really.

Somewhere in there, as I carve out space to work, I have ongoing photographic projects I need to attend to. There is the tree in Aquinnah that needs my attention on a daily and seasonal basis:

There is the building of the fish pier in Oak Bluffs:

now finished.

Finally, there is some work to try to figure out if there is merit in making pictures of some trees across a field that I first photographed in a photo class in 1968!

Ancient history I know, but true. In case you have trouble doing the math that is 46 freaking years ago! OMG!

I was taking a 4 x 5 intro class and thought that it would be good to come here to the island to make my first pictures. I hauled the school's Calumet view camera to the island in its fiberboard case, loaded the holders like we'd been told in class, set it up on the tripod in front of these same trees and made several exposures. Back at school in the gang darkrooms after a weekend on the island, I developed the film and made 4 x 5 inch contact sheets. In each frame along the center bottom of the image was the rail of the view camera, sticking into the image as a blurry reminder that it might be a good idea in the future to look over the whole image portrayed back on the ground class.

Oops.

I don't know about you but this time of year (May) feels like being shot from a canon.

I wasn't even here in New England for much of the winter but the part that I was here seemed long, cold, gray and snowy. I know good pictures can be made outdoors in that kind of weather but I may be becoming a fair weather photographer because I don't have much stomach for it anymore.

I just got back from a few days on Martha's Vineyard last week and shot daily. I also had friends visit from the mainland, saw MV friends, made a presentation to a gallery, discussed a new digital book with the publisher and worked on another book project due to be published this fall. I was able to tour my off island friends around the island that one of them had never seen before. This was something my dad loved to do, to show visitors his favorite parts of the island and I love this too. I also dealt with flat tires, dead mice in the basement, broken water lines and the exciting topic of hiring someone to dig a drywell for drainage from one of the scuppers on the roof.

Early May is pretty spectacular on the island. As it is surrounded by water and in the spring the water is cold, it keeps the island wet, foggy and colder than the mainland. It also means that spring doesn't happen on the same schedule as it does in the continental USA. That's cool on its own. The light can be bright and blue, if the sun is out:

This is the same tree I was shooting last fall

which has turned into one of those projects where you see the same thing, over and over again, in different seasons. Can be relentless. We'll see if I overdo it. I like pictures that are about the differences between things.

I also am making more long lens pictures, probably because I worked that way in California in February.

These textural pictures must be a little hard to understand at your screen size... a few inches across. But try thinking of them as 30 inches across and you might begin to get it.

I know, pretty much a cliche´, this vertical. So sue me. That's No Man's Land out there on the horizon, an unpopulated island I photographed from the air a couple of years ago.

This is down in Oak Bluffs at the new fish pier. 

The other thing that's really nice about Martha's Vineyard now is that it isn't crazy yet. Before school gets out and midweek, the Vineyard is very relaxed and not  crowded in May. The tradeoff is that it can be very cold. But get a few days of warm weather and beaches are empty, there are no lines and traffic is sparse. A month from now things will be very different.

My daughter was there last weekend, with her family, and as the weekend went on I was getting texts asking if the house was available this coming weekend as they wanted to come right back. That's the Vineyard: you can't wait to get there and you hate to leave.

Ah, the Vineyard. You must have a place you hold dear in your heart. Mine is the Vineyard.