The Wild Thing show at 555 Gallery in Boston is down. My work in the exhibit called Monsters is foam wrapped and back in my studio waiting for me to slide the framed prints back into the rack that will hold them. One of the truths to being an exhibiting artist is that the work goes out and most of it comes back.  

For those of you that weren't able to see the show I have put the majority of it on the gallery page of this site here. Allison Nordstrom wrote the introduction to the work for the show's catalog. If you'd like to read it here in the blog let me know.  You can contact me here. Below is the artist statement I wrote for the catalog, which is available through the books section of this site. In it I write about my growing understanding of the work I'd made. (BTW: The prevailing wisdom is that people do not really read blogs. I wonder if you do?)

Monsters

As I write this in July 2015 I am heavily immersed in the printing of the photographs for the show at 555 Gallery that has my pictures in it called “Monsters” that opens in mid September. Printing for a show like this is practically a single-minded effort that requires focus and blocking out distractions as much as possible. While I made these pictures in 2014, this is the first time they’ve been printed and shown.
Thanks to the wonderful essay by Alison Nordstrom in the catalog we have the necessary perspective placed on the work and she has contextualized it for us as well. I am thankful to her for providing that which I can’t. But I can attempt in this statement to bring you into the work and speak to motivation and intention. As far as success or the final result goes, I will leave that up to you.
On a gray and cold day in early winter I drove to Fitchburg MA to make a presentation of my work to the new head of the Fitchburg Art Museum. We had a great time and looked at several portfolios. I left thinking that that the meeting had gone well, and on the way out of town saw on my left a sign on top of a long low building that said, “Halloween Costume World”. I pulled over, parked and went in. Inside was quite dark and cold with aisle after aisle of all sorts of things. Halloween costumes for children and adults in plastic envelopes with pictures of models wearing what was contained within. A mask wall with what looked to be hundreds of latex masks stuck on sticks from floor to ceiling. A section of mannequins dressed in odd juxtapositions of monsters and tableaus of scenes like three of the major characters in the Wizard of Oz. And finally, in another huge room with no light and no heat at all, an odd storage area that included rentable full size models of Beetlejuice and a somewhat broken Frankenstein, assorted gory and macabre scenes of beheadings, the green Wicked Witch of the West, torture and executions, a wig wall filled with hundreds of all styles of inexpensive wigs placed on plastic head forms of amazing variety and so on. I was the only customer in the store that day. I walked right up to the man behind the desk and asked him if I could come back to take pictures. He said, “Yes, of course”. While the visit to present my work to the Fitchburg Museum turned out to be a complete waste of my time the visit to Halloween Costume World did not. I had a new project.

Over the next several months I returned many times to the store. The routine became familiar to me and to the staff in the store. I would arrive, ask them if they’d mind turning the lights on, haul in tripod and photo gear, set up and start to photograph. Each time I’d think I was finished after a few hours but when looking at the work made, realized I needed to go back to reshoot.
Working on a project like this, where the subject stays the same, is as much a discovery for the artist as it is for the viewer of the work. I learned this ten years ago when working on making pictures from the Mutter Museum in Philadelphia. The specimens weren’t gong anywhere but it was up to me to discover and apply my own imprint.
So, I worked, trying different approaches each time I went. By five or six trips photographing in the store, about an hour from where I live, I felt the work was getting redundant. So I stopped. By this time I understood that I had unearthed something a little more substantial than the pictures just being shocking, atypical, funny, or quirky. I found I was attributing personalities to these masks and head forms and mannequins. This started to show itself in nicknames for some of the characters. The three models shown side by side in the show are known as “Neal’s Passion” as they are very lovely and make me think of my youth. The large print of the vertical model with the surrounding dark hair is now “Mona”. Then there is “Dorothy” in several parts and interpretations. The side-by-side models with unbelievable lips are called “Pouty” and finally, the large print of the smashed mask is simply called “Jack”.
What began as an experiment in new seeing had now become, surprise surprise, meaningful. Little did I know. I thought when I started I had a hold of something that would entertain, be colorful and maybe titillate. What I found was that I had photographed something that, I believe, struck a more primal note. That what our genetics and our ancient brains do to these faces and the over-the-top expressions molded into these odd things is to indentify with them, to seek to form relationships with them, to, essentially, attribute personality to latex, plastic and fiberglass. This, I predict, is a path for human civilization to deal with if we survive, if we don’t blow ourselves up or contaminate where we live. Movies like Chappy, Ex Machina and Her all wrestle with our future relationship with machines we make in our image. Interesting times indeed.

In my own small way I too am moving ahead. My classmate and colleague, Arno Minkkenin says that “Art is risk made visible”, and, while perhaps an over simplification, it certainly seems to apply here. As a career artist I have made a leap with this work, taken some risk, to delve deeper into an area I have been wrestling with for ten years. What do we know about us from preserved forensic specimens? Or in the case of my Cabelas work, what do we learn from photographs of stuffed animals posed in situ in a large sports outfitting store? And finally, what can we assimilate about ourselves from the caricatures we make in our own image? These monsters in all their cheap and gaudy representation of the human condition, in all their gross exaggeration of much that is abhorrent about us as a race, can also be strangely beautiful and unsettling. Dichotomies are fascinating. Enigmas provoke and pose questions that hopefully go beyond $14.95 wigs and $29.95 latex Halloween masks.
Welcome to my world of Monsters.
Neal Rantoul
July 2015

It has not escaped my awareness that I am writing this practically on the eve of Halloween. Happy trick or treating and be safe out there.

The photographer sits at his desk on the island in the house he owns with his two sisters. It is a mid sixties Eliot Noyes designed house with a broad view of the south coast of the island as it is sited high up on a hill overlooking a mile of land before the shore with a view all the way out to the horizon. He has spoken before how this location is partially responsible for an aesthetic long on horizontality over now a career of making landscape photographs. 

2012

Faced with hip surgery soon, he finds himself unable to do things he used to take for granted. He is still able to make pictures that connect and have force, though perhaps the car is parked nearby or the picture is made close to the road, for walking isn't easy. But his fluidity with his medium is due to decades of work looking and making pictures of what he sees.

He has made new pictures at the the other end of the island in a remote place where soil erosion is winning the battle against a stand of trees.The ocean is at its most powerful here and a cut in the point of sand has wreaked havoc where the waves meet the land. 

2014

In several flights to photograph the island over the past three years, he has been struck by how much this particular landscape has been transformed. As the bluff erodes the trees have no choice but to fall, one by one. This time he drove to the end of the dirt road, parked and walked along the strip of trees, looking out at the ocean as it ripped around the outermost bend in the island. 

As is typical for him, he found himself interested in wildly different content looking out and in, a 180 degree metaphor for the external and internal lives we all lead.

This work, some new and some now three years old, is forming in his head as a project that will look at a piece of island land both from the air and also on the ground. This will be his third such project, and seems surprising to him that this isn't done by others here. This sense one has of what the place really looks like from the air as in a kind of survey contrasted with what is perceived of the individual choices he makes as he works throughout the land on foot. One almost objectified and the other highly personal, almost intimate. The place versus his place. Like that.

These two from a series in 2014 that looked at Tom's Neck from the ground (well, actually, from the water as he made these while in a kayak) and from the air.

These are from the island of Chappaquidick near the Dyke Bridge.

The other project made here, the first, is: Spring and Fall

As he sits at his desk as the light fades from the day writing and thinking about these photographs and all his work made here on the island, he finds the challenge of making new work of this landscape to be difficult but also extremely rewarding. One of his teachers long ago, Aaron Siskind, who also photographed here, said to him that the place was only an island, meaning that you would inevitably run out of material here. The photographer has at times worked hard here and at other times not at all but he finds now there are still things to do on this island. 

He is very fortunate to live at least part of the year in a place of such beauty and diversity. 

He chooses to end with these, in black and white now, of the trees that fell and haven't yet been swept away by winter storms. And the last picture, forecasting a very different season approaching.

The photographer is represented by 555 Gallery in Boston. Please contact Susan Nalband, the gallery owner, with any questions about this work or any other by the photographer who happens to be named Neal Rantoul.

Of course you can always email me and I welcome your comments: Neal's email

I just added a series to the site called Mountain Work from 1977/78, (here). Hard to believe I was making pictures so long ago but it's true.

Mountain work was series work before I knew most of my career I would be a series photographer. I made them during a very active period when I was carrying several projects at the same time. In truth my single mindedness about making pictures back then looks, from this perspective, a little deranged but there is no doubt I was making good work in there, if perhaps making too much. Mountain Work was a portfolio of 20 black and white photographs made at the top of  "drive up"mountains. I thought then and still do that these are unique places, with wide vistas, huge skies and, in the summer, people from all walks separated from their more mundane lives, placed as though the sky above was a sort of backdrop for them and, yes, presumptuous I know, for me as well to photograph their interactions, joys  and gestures at being on top of the world. I was passionate about the project and went to places like Mt. Tom, Mt Battie, Mt Tamalpais, Mt Washington, Mt Cadillac. The only rule was that this be a destination you could get to by driving to the summit. Tourist mountains.

Wait a minute. Do you realize the exceptional-ness of the last few sentences in the paragraph above?  This from the guy that does not photograph people. Well, I did in this series, so there. From Mountain Work in 1978 to Monsters in 2015 (some 37 years!) being shown at 555 Gallery in Boston in September, I've gone from photographing the human beings in situ to photographing fake people as masks and mannequins. We will see soon if this is progress.

At any rate, before we get to the pictures let me place them in context. In those years I was single, had not yet started a family and was in my early 30's. I began teaching at Harvard in the fall of 78, was teaching summers at the Maine Photographic Workshops, and had been teaching at NESOP (New England School of Photography) for a couple of years. I would, the following winter, take a self imposed leave from both to drive through the Southwest to photograph. This was the trip that changed my life because I spent 3 days with Fred Sommer (posts on that begin here and continue for three more, searchable by typing Fred Sommer in the search field).

The Mountain Work also ushered in something else. The pictures were mostly made with Kodak's Plus-X. The year before I had devised a new and constant film agitating procedure for processing my negatives and was showing that off with these pictures. While these on screen won't show it well, the large expanses of middle tonality grays of skies in the series were smooth and clean. 

I would drive to the top of the mountain, park, get my camera out and stay for hours, watching as the cast of characters changed as they got out of their cars, headed over to the viewing area, pointed out at things way off, took pictures, hung out a little, got back in their cars and drove away. Only to be replaced with others in a steady stream of  humanity in all shapes, sizes and dispositions. 

This was a sequenced series, in that it moved from start to middle to end in a flow. 

I treated vehicles about the same, photographically, as I did the people.

What's the exhibition history of these pictures?  Practically nonexistent. I showed them once, in a show at my niece's non profit gallery in Newport RI in the 90's. Published? Nope. Anyone know about them before now? Pretty safe to say no. The prints are about 12 inches square, toned with selenium and cool in color. This is a little embarrassing to admit but there is only one copy of these prints. Back then, no one I knew printed editions or copies of prints. 

This one, with a Rollei SL 66 that could tilt, made hand held. Scheimpflug through space. Don't know what that is? Go here. Sharp from small bush in foreground, through woman's arm then off to the left through trees and to the horizon. All the rest not sharp. I used this camera quite often that way. I felt it differentiated my work and that I could direct the viewer's path through my pictures.

I always thought this one above predicted my moving into a stage of marriage and being a young parent with a baby in my arms. In fact, I would be a parent four years later.

This one is a favorite: independent activities on the stage of this parking lot at the same time, almost as though choreographed.

As the series moved on it began to reduce the people in scale to smaller and smaller.

Then, in the next to last picture, the shock of three people, the largest yet, and an acute foreground-to-background range through the fog of early morning at Mt Tamalpais north of San Francisco. I always loved that gesture,  someone pointing off to somewhere.

And finally,

with the lone figure standing on the rock way back there, the picture bisected at a 45 degree diagonal.

The full series is here. 

Let me know what you think, but please, take a look at the full set first.

Neal's Email

Note: this is an extremely poor facsimile of the originals.Want to see the actual prints? This can be easily arranged through 555 Gallery, as they represent my work.

By the way, I made another Mountain Work series of pictures in 2011. They are here.

Acting on a tip from a friend, I found myself with my camera on a tripod in front of a long row of sand sculptures at the beach in Revere, MA the other day. It was just about to rain. That can make you hurry.

This is what I got.

Of course, and this has happened before, when confronted with so much sheer talent and skill, are my pictures about anything beyond just documentation or, should they be? It seems an ultimate form of pretentiousness, doesn't it, to say nothing about being presumptuous.  To think you could make your own art off of someone's else's?

Mess with it? Alter it? Record it? Just get it in the camera?

I don't really have the answer here. But it often seems that photo projects, or perhaps art projects are a problem to be solved. Part of our fascination with the world as we work to render parts of it with a camera is how to get it to do what we want. Or, more accurately, it's first to  define what we want it to look like THEN get it to look the way we want.

Artists are born, not made(?) Partially true and partially not true. Yes, artists are born with some proclivities towards creative processes. But everyone's creative. Perhaps with artists that door is swung a little more open. I for one, can't not make art of something. I can't turn "art" off because I am in front of someone else's art with a camera. Making art is, after all, what I do.

Decay has been big for me for a long time:

natural:

I made this of erosion in Highlands , North Carolina in about 1988 in 8 x 10.

and man made:

from Peddocks Island  shot in 2005.

I wrote this back in late September but never published it. Now, with it being 16 degrees out, windy and gray with a dusting of snow on the ground it seems like a good time to put a little summer color out there.

What if you had trained to be a painter? What if you were a colorist way back in your twenties when you were spray painting very large canvases with huge areas of solid colors? What if you then switched to photography and stayed with it through 30 years of  black and white prints you made in your darkroom? What if you then changed to the new world of digital printmaking and then a few years later to shooting with a digital camera?

You'd probably still be a colorist at heart, right? Maybe not always, but sometimes. 

Windsor Fair, Maine 2014

I know, there's something else going on in some of these besides color. They're a little scary and twisted, yes?

My brother-in-law Marc Harrison, who died of ALS years ago, always said he hated Disney cartoons and I agree. He claimed he'd been traumatized by watching them in movie theaters as a kid. Cartoons like Dumbo and Pinocchio, where parents are killed and a little kid has to fend for himself. I tend to agree.

Stay warm.