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.

I wonder if you photograph where you live. Of course, if you shoot still lifes you may very well photograph where you live in your studio. But if you shoot outdoors, do you walk the streets in your neighborhood and photograph close to home? I don't. In fact, I don't really know my neighborhood that well. I'm not a walker, I don't have a  dog and I drive or bike most everywhere (I know, driving everywhere is not so politically correct these days). 

But, in 1994 I did something very different for me. I made a series of photographs in Cambridge, MA where I live that, although they were not in my immediate neighborhood, were made not far away on the other side of town. 

I also made them using the 8 x 10 inch view camera. Imagine someone walking around your neighborhood with a huge view camera on a tripod, plunking it down in front of your house, going underneath a black cloth and fiddling with things, the  guy probably muttering to himself, pointing a  gun-like thing at the house and making some adjustments to the lens in the front of the camera, inserting some big flat black thing in the back of the camera, pulling out a slide of some sort, pushing a cable release and then reinserting the slide, throwing the camera over his shoulder and moving on down the street, only to repeat the same process in front of someone else's house. OMG! Call 911! While this is now 20 years ago, I can safely say no one bothered me the whole time. Before September 2001 people were far less worried about stuff like what I was doing.

Over three weeks in the fall of 1994 I did just that, while teaching and going to my ever present meetings. I was working at this project. This was a brief but intense time to make a series, particularly with the big camera. This was also a time I was not making my regular series work, as I'd sold the camera I used for these to buy the 8 x 10 ten years before. And for the all the reasons described in the paragraph above, I didn't use the 8 x 10 to make series work.

Except in Cambridge in the fall of 1994.

Since the project was close by, I did shoot and then have film processed while I was working on this new series. This was not typical for me in those days, to be able to track what I was doing while I was doing it. So often I'd be in Italy or across the country someplace, making pictures. We take this for granted now, of course, with screens on the back of our cameras and our laptop computers nearby. While I don't like the camera screens much, I really like seeing my work at the end of a long shooting day on the screen of my laptop, wherever I am.

At any rate, the Cambridge Series I made in 1994 was a very big deal in Neal's world. It was really good work, if I do say so, but exceptionally quiet in that these weren't flashy pictures, in fact, so quiet and unassuming it is almost as though the photographer and the process weren't there. The prints are 24 x 20 inches, larger than most series work either preceding these or following them. They are black and white darkroom prints that are archivally  processed, painstakingly developed in trays and finished in a selenium toner bath. I made these with Ilford's XP1 film, a black and white chromogenic film (meaning it was a monochromatic color negative film processed in color chemistry). Much of the  80's and 90's Ilford sponsored my 8 x 10 work with great quantities of film as I was known as a "field tester" for the company.

This characteristic of the "art" being subdued and the content coming through loud and clear is a core value of mine in much of my photography, particularly in much of the 8 x 10 work. What if the tool you used to make your art was so good, so clear, with such high fidelity that it, in effect, went away? What if what it rendered was so there, so present that there was really no obstacle to your viewing the thing being shown? What if the point was just that, to show and really derive the sheer facts sitting there on the print right in front of you? In effect that this content and clarity was actually the art? What if the tool used became not important or seemingly not significant as it left no apparent signature? That fantastic transparency or neutrality is a major reason why I lugged that thing around for over 20 years. 

As the actual prints are 20 x 24 inches the size allows you to see all the subtlety inherent in the image. I was just teaching this principle to a student at Penland two weeks ago but, in a photograph like the one above, I used the Scheimpflug principle to contain sharpness along the oblique angle of the face of this building.

When I finished these I began to show them around but not many people got them. They were simply too quiet and too ordinary-looking to pique much interest. In those years I was showing a young curator from Harvard work every couple of years or so. Deborah Martin Kao is now the Head Curator of the Harvard Art Museums. But then she was simply the curator of Prints, Drawings, and Photographs at Harvard's Fogg Museum. When I showed her the work she got them and, after careful consideration while looking at other series, decided to buy two of them. As I wanted a more complete representative selection of the series, I donated two prints from the series at the same time.

Thank you, Debi. Good choice.

Besides all the technical and logistical facts about this series, there is the larger point to be made that the work resides in the time in which it was made, a product of my aesthetic back then and the realization that by pointing my camera where I did I made choices and preferences. By this, I mean that the final prints are their own justification. To take pictures of the everyday and commonplace and render that content with such fidelity that things can be seen that would not be noticed if we were standing in front of the real thing is its own just cause.

Very few got this, but this work represented my effort to ask us to look at the medium itself, partly as validation of its remarkable abilities but also to question how it sees our world.

When the Fogg reopens this fall after a three-year complete gut and remake renovation you should be able to see the prints the museum acquired. How do you do this? Call ahead and ask to see the 4 Rantoul prints from Cambridge in the permanent collection. And let me know what you think.

Of course, there are different kinds of risk. There is jump off the bridge attached to a bungee cord type of risk. There is being on the front line in a war type of risk. Then there is career risk, the kind that makes you jump ahead, stick your neck out, taking a chance on an idea you've had or sticking up for yourself among colleagues. The cliché "nothing ventured nothing gained comes to mind."

Last week I took a risk and yes, it feels good to have done it. Each session at Penland, where I was teaching, the faculty present their work in evening slide shows. Each has 10 minutes to show whatever they like in front of the community of artists and craftspeople present in that particular session of classes. I chose to show the work of mine from the Mutter Museum in Philadelphia (Mutter) and the pictures from Reggio Emilia in Italy (Spallanzani Collection) to, what turned out to be, a stunned audience. The two times I'd presented before when teaching there I had shown landscape work and work from older series so there was some shock at seeing pictures of medical specimens up on the screen in the auditorium that when projected were about 16 feet across.

Finally, for the last work I showed I put up slides of the new "Monsters" work. Notice that there's no link to the work on the site? That's because I am withholding posting them for a bit, but stay tuned as some will go up soon. "Monsters" will be shown at 555 Gallery sometime in the next year, dates to be determined, meaning we haven't figured that part out yet. Want to see this work? Let Susan Nalband at the gallery know your feelings: 555 Gallery. BTW: I am pleased to announce here that I will be showing in Boston with 555 Gallery from now on. What's that mean? Want to see works of mine? Contact the gallery. Easy.

It was wonderful to surprise the crowd with this work. Before mine, Mercedes Jelinek showed hew work along with her killer video of her making pictures using photo booth (Mercedes) and then Chris Benfey went, standing in front of the audience, reading a poem he wrote and some wonderful phrases that were observational, personal, quirky and marvelous. 

Ah Penland: so much, always powerful and positive and as though two weeks there can sustain an energy level throughout the following year. 

This post continues and finishes a discussion about the original Nantucket pictures I made in 1980. The other posts, Nantucket 1, 2, and 3 proceed this one, if you haven't read them yet.

In Part 4 we'll take a look at the ending to the Nantucket series and I'll let you in on a little secret.

We left off in Part 3 with a picture that changed things structurally within the series. Let's see where the 11th picture in the set takes us:

Here, we're back to the previous structure with the fence sitting in the foreground. The only thing different and perhaps anomalous with this one is that, while the gate is open as we've seen in others before it, we aren't shown where it leads. To be honest, this is my least favorite picture in the series and were I to do this over I probably wouldn't include it. However, it does serve as an effective hinge to the next one:

which is mostly about geometry, in which I did poorly in school. Maybe this redeems that a little. Triangles and geometric shapes everywhere, even in the sky if you look at the two spaces cut by the roofs. This was fun to make and is still enjoyable to look at.

Here, we're back into barriers and yet with a make up that is far more open than in earlier pictures in the group. Point down with a wide lens and verticals will bow out as you can see on the side of the house on the right. This makes the picture look a little like being made from inside a fishbowl.

This one's another structure changer, stopping the alley I've set up with a street and a Volvo sitting squarely in the way, almost impeding progress completely. The only way out is the driveway to the right, that really isn't very promising as it looks to stop you behind the bush. I often get questions in lectures as to why I include cars in my pictures. Because they provide scale. We all know how large a car is.

Here we are, closing the series out with a picture that is practically fully closed in, that almost obscures everything. Is this some sort of statement about mankind and how, when we are gone, the natural world will reclaim its prominence?  

Or is it about disallowing the structure that constrained the previous pictures and defined them as well? 

Or does this picture refute the ones that came before it? 

Why won't I say what this is, this picture? Because it isn't for me to tell you what it is is, it is for you to tell to decide.

Finally, and in the nature of full disclosure, in the printed series the last picture is this, here poorly reproduced as I have no scan of the negative:

(The two light areas are reflections from the bulbs used to make the slide, not in the print)

The print shows us a street, dark foliage above a driveway pulling back and getting lighter as it reaches the background, indicating some open sky back there. A dark foreboding image but with perhaps a ray of hope? That was my intention.

Over the years, as the series has been shown from time to time I have included this last image probably more times than not, although when I made the Nantucket pictures the last in the series was the one before this one, the one with the growth taking over. Why? I can't exactly say, except that one seemed more dire than the other. 

When I printed the series for the first time I was very excited, as I'd made pictures in a fundamentally new way for me and felt I'd made a breakthrough. In showing them to a close colleague at Harvard, she said that they were very depressing. I liked that as she got their weight and maybe their depth. But to end with a picture that didn't allow you out, to not permit escape from these pictures' weight seemed too much at times so I would include the last one with the driveway to indicate at least a possibility of a positive outcome. I always thought of this series as having different endings as in a film where the director has shot different endings for different audiences or markets. The movie Blade Runner was like that. The director, Ridley Scott, shot different versions of the ending.

This finishes my look at the first series I made. I hope you have enjoyed it. As  always, you may contribute to the conversation by emailing me:

Neal's Email

I've written occasionally about a picture of mine that stands out or seems special. For instance, the tennis court picture I wrote about in What Is It?.

This post uses Yogi Berra's famous line: "Deja Vu all over again" as the picture below has been haunting me since I made it.

The photograph I am writing about is this which has been obsessing me since I made a print of it.

What's so special about it?  The line of trees and their shadows running down the right center of the frame. This is from a current project called Route 2 Trilogy that is 2/3 finished. It is aerial photographs taken along Rt 2 as it traverses the state of Massachusetts from Boston out to the Berkshires and the border of New York.

Exceptional? The picture looks fairly ordinary, a suburban street (actually near Fitchburg, MA) with homes on either side, clearly made in the late fall or early spring because there are no leaves on the trees. But it is the line of trees that gets me, so black it is hard to tell whether we are looking at trees or shadows of trees. Notice that above I wrote "since I made a print of it"? That's because there was quite a bit of work done to the file in post production to emphasize the trees and their shadows. This wasn't really finalized until I made the print.

Here it is cropped:

Pretty bizarre, yes? As in tentacles. The contrast of peaceful domesticity along a tree lined street in broad daylight with these trees throwing ominous shadows just slays me. But just recently I figured out why it feels like "deja vu all over again".  I rewatched the 1999 film American Beauty  a couple of weeks ago and guess what happens at the beginning and end of the movie?

There is an aerial tracking shot of the suburban street where Kevin Spacey lives with his family and where most of the film takes place. Aha! (I really did have a genuine "aha" moment when I saw the film.) The trees have the same kind of prominence in the frame, and the structure of the picture is very much the same as mine.

I've written before about the Sam Mendes film "American Beauty" in the post My American Beauty but didn't remember this until I saw it again recently. Funny how powerful imagery can be and how we often relate to pictures on a subliminal level.

So, did I make the picture in response to a scene to a movie I first saw in 1999 or did I make my aerial photograph independently and then note its similarity as I saw the movie again? I do not know.

Love the enigma.