Reserve flight out to Spokane from Boston: check

Reserve rental car: check

Reserve cottage in Moscow, Idaho: check

Ship gyro stabilizer out ahead of time: check

Get camera sensor cleaned: check

Pack: check

Fly and arrive

Shoot for several days with it raining on and off waiting for good weather: check

Reserve plane from Doug Gadwa, pilot I fly with: check

Day of aerials fly with door off in back seated next to large opening, camera in hand, preset to the right shutter speed (fast), gyro spinning at 21000 rpm to stabilize the camera, harnessed in but able to lean out and point straight down (Jesus! scary), shoot 516 frames in one hour: check

All that for one hour's shooting? Seems crazy, doesn't it? This is a "discretionary " trip, meaning I am not on assignment, no one's paying me to come out here, not on any grant. Most won't even know I've gone. 

Ah, but then this happens:

Which, for me, makes it all worthwhile. 

BTW: looking at these on your brand new super iPhone 7 will only lead you to surmise that the photographs are nice but not "special." That will be the wrong conclusion. Check this out below. You can see real prints soon, the weekend after the elections. After what we've all been through you may need something aesthetically pleasing to sooth your soul. 

Coming up:

Open Studios in Allston at 119 Braintree Street, Allston November 12 and 13 from 12-6 both days. I will be there and the studio will be open. As I get home this Thursday I will make prints of some of these for that weekend. Hope you can come.

(Note to readers: I  have written the following short story about a fictional character named Marc S. Meyer. He simply does not exist. The new photographs do exist and were made by me over the past month or so. Why all this subterfuge? Think of this as an author who writes under a pseudonym. I call this "Photo Fiction" and it allows me to get into the head of a different character and to photograph with a different emphasis. The other two portfolios of Marc's do exist as do the corresponding blogs about the work  and are viewable on the gallery page of the site, listed under Marc S. Meyer.  This is the first time I've come clean with who Marc really is, or isn't. As there are now many more readers of this blog it seemed  disingenuous to continue the pretense. I have just added the pictures to the website and they are here. Needless to say, I am very interested in your reaction to all this. Please feel free to respond at Neal's email)

Marc S. Meyer

I’ve written before about Marc S. Meyer, the young photographer who made the portfolios Beach Club and Baldwinville.

We haven’t heard much from Marc for a couple of years and since I am serving as his spokesperson for his work I wanted to bring you readers up to date. If you remember, I agreed to take on his work within my site as a way to promote it and allow larger numbers of people to see it. One of the reasons Marc is as private as he is, is that he has a condition that tends to keep him out of the public’s eye. Marc has given his approval for bringing you into this a little as it is important in the context of understanding his work. Just suffice it to be known that part of his condition has a physical manifestation and therefore his privacy is of a large concern to him.

Marc’s condition is also a progressive ailment in that as time moves on he will decline and eventually he will die from it. Despite this we’ve seen the quality of Marc’s work and know his intelligence, drive and devotion. But also, considering the limitation imposed on him by his disease, he has been working to make a body of photographs that is the culmination of his oeuvre, as he knows time is running out for him. In the past couple of years Marc has been very sick a few times so his future is unknown.

In brief, this may be the last complete body of work we will get from Marc S. Meyer.

Let me see if I can accurately characterize Marc’s intentions with this new work. It is fascinating to learn his thinking behind his process. He wanted to work within his discipline of photography to minimize and partially deny content to allow his intent to come through. Obviously, these are emotionally charged pictures but they are made without so much as a hint of emphasis prescribed to the actual subject. He has always been a proponent of the thinking that goes, “What if I…?”, that innate curiosity that makes his pictures so compelling. 

Marc tends to think of the world out there as a canvas in which to make his photographs. Not exactly a blank canvas, but adaptable to what he wants to say, malleable and formable to his intent.

Marc understands that to be a subtle and quiet revolutionary is never easy.

There's really no other way to say this than to lay it out: Marc chose a gravel pit across the way from a new Market Basket supermarket in Athol, MA as his subject. Nothing could be more enigmatic or better. Gravel, dirt, sky and perhaps a little of the surrounding hills in the background. That’s it. The photographs are beautiful, and we expect this from Marc, but they are also empty and carry minimalism to its logical conclusion while staying firmly within reality-based practice. Is this Marc dealing with the void left after he dies?

Or is this Marc taking us someplace else, perhaps reaching farther than the mundane nature of shopping for food or looking at a gravel pit? No answers are given. But we are forced to place this work in the context of his other photographs, which in review now take on a larger significance, these empty and abandoned places. The new pictures, made in summer on sunny bright days with deep blue skies seem counter to the earlier work but in this context, they take on something more sinister.

Marc gave his permission for me to ask his wife, Theresa, for an interview as they are very close, almost collaborators on his projects. I met Theresa for coffee one morning in rural Maryland where the couple lives with their 4-year-old boy, Jonah, who was in day care at the time. Theresa is a significant force on her own, trained as a research biologist with a Ph.D. in molecular biological functions from UC Berkeley.

Theresa is clearly very much in love with her husband and it became apparent as we talked that she was as committed to this project as he was. I asked her how it all started. Marc had followed the story about the Market Basket company a few years earlier, a Massachusetts based supermarket chain that was involved in a hostile takeover by one family member over another. This was the case of the Demoulas family, with the company employees striking to disallow the change over as they were loyal to the original owner. It is a case now studied at the Harvard Business School as it bucks present day trends. The company is back in good health with its original owner. In fact, it is expanding. Hence this new store in Athol, a small town a little over an hour west of Boston.

Theresa told me that this turned out to be a perfect site for Mark as he wanted the resonance of the back story of the attempted takeover of the Market Basket to inhabit the pictures he made. Initially, he photographed the site under construction, to directly confront both the company’s issues and his own. After obtaining permission to photograph the complex under construction (the company was very helpful in this regard) Marc grew increasingly concerned that this was not the right approach. Remember, he was driving back and forth from Maryland to make these pictures. 

Each trip he would think about what he was about to do and on the return what he had just done. 

The project wasn’t going well and, remember, his health was a constant player in these trips he would take. Theresa said he had a breakthrough one trip. Construction crews started to clear a site across the way from the supermarket which was almost finished. Graders and loaders were at work to first clear the land but then massive amounts of gravel were being trucked in. The crews were building, what looked like to Marc, mountains of gravel, piles of different types, some almost black, some almost white. He started to photograph them right away.

Theresa remembers that time well as Marc was re-energized, excited to be heading back to photograph every couple of weeks, shocked to see a mountain disappear on one trip only to be replaced by another made of a different kind of gravel. He told her one night laying in bed that he felt he’d found it, he’d arrived at some place in his work that would allow him to share his perception of the actual world and conveying in his pictures something other worldly as well. This, he felt, was what he’d been after all along, to take the inane and ordinary and imbue it with meaning, both personal but also universal.

With thanks to Theresa for talking to me, when I got back home, I next drove out to the site to see what this was all about. As you might predict, what I saw was mounds of gravel in an empty lot. No magic, no universal truth, only gravel, green trees and blue sky. Nada. To think that Marc S. Meyer could get meaning, beauty, substance and universality out of these mounds of rock is just unbelievable to me.

How can you charge or load photographs? Can you build or imbue your pictures with a back story or some context so that they will matter? How do pictures made by a very ill artist of some gravel in a parking lot across the street from a new supermarket in rural Massachusetts make any sense? Is it the nature or the outright enigma that conveys something? Or is it all so anachronistic as to be meaningless?

Of course, the simple answer is that it all needs to be in the pictures, that the true art in Marc’s approach needs to lean little on the conditions around the making of his pictures. Wouldn’t Marc’s inherent abilities suffice?

On the other hand, one thing’s for sure. If you read what I’ve written carefully and retain the story in your mind, then go to the pictures to see what they look like, you are altered in your perception, biased in fact, by what you’ve read. Is that what Marc’s doing here?

I can’t answer all these questions for you but I can urge you to look at the work, to see if you can align his thinking with your reaction. 

Personally, I find the pictures very powerful, as though all that weight of that rock mined from the earth and crushed into gravel makes some kind of bond in an allegory to the weight of Marc’s physical condition bearing down on him. 

Add in some tangent in the story of a supermarket chain’s failed takeover and you have a rich stew of precepts carried into the work, visually pure and minimal pictures about as close to the core of Marc S. Meyer as anything he has done or will ever do.

Neal Rantoul

July 2016

* The Beach Club, Baldwinville and now the Gravel pictures exist as separately printed portfolios and can be seen at my studio in Boston. Please contact me directly nrantoul@comcast.net to arrange an appointment to see these works.

My blog posts about Marc’s work and a brief biography are here:

http://www.nealrantoul.com/posts/marc-s-meyer-profile

http://www.nealrantoul.com/posts/baldwinville-ma-2015

I've just added some new pictures to the site called "The Field." Take a look: here.

Head out to Medfield, MA right through town and out to the site of the Medfield State Hospital, drive right past the incredibly beautiful red brick buildings of the "campus", past the old and new water towers to the back side where there is a huge field.

That's where I've been working this week.

The hospital used to grow its own food so it's easy to understand the size of this field. My formula? Flat light, very careful wide angle work with several trips back to correct, reshoot, reframe and try to perfect (never possible but I still try). This project comes at a very good time for me as, since recovering from both hips being replaced this past winter, there has been little new work. In the early spring I finished a series called Zinc but that was work started earlier, last fall. The well has been relatively dry since then. This is a glacial pace for someone who has been traditionally very prolific. I think full recovery takes longer than I thought but truthfully, it has taken me a while to love what I do again. I am pleased to see that love returning in these pictures.

Some lead-in pictures

Some establishing pictures

Some confrontational pictures

including an epic crop of poison ivy growing up the fence. Then a few that I like to think of as substantive

like this one, the bike sitting there day after day each time I went back. What is the story? Where is its owner? Love a mystery.

This is a way of making pictures I've been using since the early 80's called Series Work. If you've read this blog before you know there are many. This way of working lies at the core of whatever I've made as a career photographer. These are sequenced pictures, one sitting next to another as in pages in a book. There is a beginning, a middle, usually a climax and an ending. There is a narrative, as abstract and obtuse as it may seem. Many of my series prescribe a path around a place or an area, as does this one. The Field is 18 photographs with two used as bookends, or framing pieces. Here's the opener:

an old park bench at the edge of the campus showing its age as there is a small tree growing right up through it and then the closer.

that perhaps it is not so difficult to tell is in color, to bring us out of the altered state of black and white and very wide lens. This one made with a longer focal length and normal perspective. Again the full series lives here.

Now, you and I both know that this blog and this online presentation is an extremely poor representation of the real work, which is printed on 22 x 17 inch paper and is quite simply, extraordinary. I know, a very bold statement and yet it's not bragging if it's true, right? You really do owe it to yourself to see the actual prints as I have something of a reputation as a very good printer. See if I've lived up to the hype.

In the summers of 1978 and 1979 I made a series of pictures at the tops of tourist mountains in the States, those uniquely odd drive-up mountains with great views that seem to place human beings in a different world. It was and is one of the few series I have ever made of people.

Shooting mostly from behind I used open sky like a back drop and looked at relationships, gestures, body language and issues of scale. I also photographed vehicles.

I photographed mostly with the Superwide Hasselblad but also used the 2 1/4 Rollei SL66 handheld. I made the prints in my darkroom on 14 x 17 inch Kodak Polymax paper, and toned them with selenium. The final prints are about 12 inches square.

The original Mountain Work series is here. I wrote about the work in a blog post: here.

1978

2015

The pictures are from mountains like Mt Washington in NH, Mt Tamalpais in CA, Mt Cadillac and Mt Tom in ME.

As often happens the sensibility used from earlier work does not just go away in later years. I have been photographing in a similar way over the past year or so. The trick, of course, is to bring something new to the table. We all have places we return to over and over again throughout our lives. This new series is no exception.

These are digital and in a whole different world, focal-length-wise: 80-400 mm. In 1978 I didn't know nor had used anything longer than the normal length lens for the format and tended to use wide angle lenses. 

Comparisons are inevitable:

My sense is that this is a continuation of a way of working formed in the late 70's  with some new parameters thrown in, not something completely new or ground breaking.

I don't know if at my age and abilities that "new" is on the horizon for me. I hope so but have no evidence to prove it. At any rate these pictures utilize a different technology in the capture and also in the printing than the originals; a compression of space as opposed to normal or wide angle focal lengths, color as opposed to black and white and the use of the same eyes and brain but thinking informed by 37 years of experience.

As a tactic, photographing people from behind is a tough thing to do, meaning that it "anonymizes" them, taking away the smile or the frown or the eye to eye contact. It also is often what someone does when they don't have the nerve to face their subjects. This is seen in early street work, where the photographer is trying to do something quick and spontaneous but doesn't yet have the skills or experience to pull it off. I know this, but in this work there is a different strategy at play. Pictures made from in back of people gets us looking at what they are looking at much more. We see the landscape or scene as through their eyes, even with their perspective. That's mostly what I was doing with these. Not making portraits in any way but photographing the people as "symbols" and emphasizing gestures. 

I  am not posting these on the site yet as they are not final edited.

BTW: Note that this will be the third "Mountain Work" as there is another made in 2011 that uses mountains but in a very different way. Take a look :Mountain Work 2011

Stay tuned.

In November 2014 I flew to Paris, picked up a rental car and drove south to Alba, Italy to visit with my friends John and Donna, who lived there then. Donna was working during the days so John and I went off so he could show me around. We stopped a few times to photograph. One morning we stopped at some wine vineyards, as there was a break in the rain. This is the famous Barbaresco area of vineyards, maintained now for generations and known to produce some of the best wines of Italy.

Over a couple of hours, with my camera on a tripod and with a long lens, I pointed at the rows of vines. The lens compresses space, bringing the farther away in closer and putting the closer subjects on a similar plane. It was gray and flat, with occasional breaks in the clouds letting sunlight in. It was dead calm and looked like it could start to rain again any moment.

I have just finished a very urban set of pictures of a new apartment building in Cambridge called Zinc. In deciding to go through back files I think I was looking for a counter to the dystopian view of a contemporary world gone askew that was Zinc. The vineyard pictures I had made in 2014 in Italy proved to be just the thing: beauty and this ancient landscape of manicured vineyards in these rolling hills.

The head versus the heart. Pictures made with much thought, thinking through the angles, framing, photographing for impact and to drive the point home versus letting the process of photographing unfold, variety within a common theme, and letting the sheer beauty wash over me. No schedule, no time limits. Just working, looking and feeling the place, the smells, the air and being at someplace simply sublime. About as good as it gets.

Almost two years between these two sets of pictures. Without one would there be the other? Probably not.The Zinc pictures just shot and printed this spring (2016) are all about the work made in this crystalline clarity, jarring and cutting like a knife. In comparison there is a flow here, a pattern, one affecting the other that is important to see, to react to. Just as we need to be at our creative best when in front of something we are photographing, just as we need to be tuned and in top form when we are making the prints, we also need to be 100% aware of one body of work affecting another.

Can I say that I was thinking about the Vineyard pictures from Italy while I was making Zinc? No. Can I say that after finishing the work on Zinc, feeling depleted and a little low, I was searching for something uplifting, far away and imbued with color? Yes, I can.

This is probably a first for me. One body of work just finished precipitating the printing of an earlier body of work. Maybe I should pair them. Will think about that.

The full series is now on the gallery page of the site here.