By 2006 I was definitely shooting digitally, but still had one foot squarely in shooting film as well. Westwood Village is a "hybrid" series in that it started out being made with a film camera, but then the processed negatives were scanned and made into archival inkjet prints. The prints are made as duotones, a process by which we can add a second color ink to the already neutral black ink we use to make black and white prints with an inkjet printer.

Westwood Village is a series that is the same but different in that it stays within the format I'd established over 25 years earlier of shooting series work in 2 1/4 inches square and making black and white prints (about 12 x12 inches) that were arranged sequentially to form a body of work. But it also diverges in that it starts out with the promotional brochure used to sell the units in the development.

I'd never done that before. But the contrast from the Utopian view of this midde income complex of townhouses to the reality of what it looked like at the end of the winter in March on a gray day in mid week with snow still on the ground was just too rich to ignore.

I remember printing these and how I'd refer back to the sales brochure. It influenced my printing as these are some of the ugliest prints I have ever made into a series.

Pretty bleak, huh? Things weren't that great for me that spring in 2006. At work we were suffering under departmental leadership that wasn't. Moral was low and the faculty were barely hanging on. Personally, my family life was nonexistent as I had little contact with my daughter, Maru, who was living in Florida. March in New England is never good. Cold and relentlessly gray, it is always a month that teases at spring's coming but never fails to deliver lousy weather.

But the earlier ones in the series are also a set up in that I did find beauty here on the side of this hill outside Danbury, CT.

In looking back at this picture now, almost eight years later, can I say I was consciously aware of the opposing triangles, the bush in the foreground and the roof in the background? Yes. I assume that's what got me standing there clicking the shutter. Do I like this picture? Yes, very much. Simple, bold, definitive, rich texturally, spacially interesting as there is a real journey from the front to the back, closed-in but opening out to that gray sky on the top; it looks to me like vintage Neal Rantoul at the top of his form (can't be accused of modesty there, can I?).

Anyway, this led me to a study of these evergreens, which seemed to soak up whatever light there was like a sponge and cover the hillside like a carpet.

Which I put up against the bland and rigid architecture of the development itself.

Despite the humor and irony of the opening images of the sales brochure, this is a serious set of photographs. I am shooting with both barrels loaded here, if you can forgive the gun-based analogy.

I also took a couple of  "creative license" turns here. And why not? At this point I had little or no following, no gallery representing my work, no big and prestigious shows coming up and no one beating down my door to see and purchase my work.

Besides, this was just too good to pass up; the stand of dark tees, this barren desert of lawn and the chink in the armor, this crack of a crevasse opening up and leading to the grid of the manhole cover. Tilt the camera? Absolutely.

So, how did I end this one? By using a time honored process of letting the pictures breath a little, letting the viewer see an opening or perhaps letting the viewer leave this place behind, or at least promise at the possibility. 

Escape? I couldn't wait to leave Westwood Village that day! I've driven past it many times since and have never exited the highway and driven up there to see it  again. Doubt I ever will.

The full series is: here

Contrast this one to the most recent post, from Italy: Fort Dei Marmi. Like from two different planets.

Blog's are very much a one way thing, for the most part. As the readership grows I am very pleased at this silent but positive response to my work. But it would be very helpful to hear from you. Are you getting anything from my writing about my work? Do you think I am on or off point in my comments and analysis? Once again, I will respect your privacy if you do email me.

Neal Rantoul may be reached here

Oh, and Happy New Year!

I made Yountville, CA in 1981, less than a year after I made the Nantucket series. This was still a new way for me to work, connecting pictures to pictures, and I was very excited to have found a system that would allow me to make bodies of work, rather than unconnected single pictures.

With these I followed the same model as with the Nantucket pictures. Flat light and walking around an area. In this case it was early morning in March and there was fog that wasn't burning off yet. It kept things flat, good for the pictures I was making in those years. Yountville is one of the towns north of San Francisco in wine country. I have been back to visit the same streets several times since, and have even tried to make new series from the same place, with little success. Yountville is much more built up now. 

I was interested in forming linkages from picture to picture:

I had no training in this way of working. Graduate school had been mostly about single pictures, not groups or series of pictures and I don't believe we ever talked about sequencing. I don't think I had anyone to talk with about these pictures either. Working in isolation has its rewards, of course, as there's no one there to tell you how wrong you are. On the other hand, working that way makes for work that is perhaps too much a singular view or that has an emotional tone that is unsupportive of the work.

I remember sweating bullets over the prints. With the Nantucket series I'd established a precedent for flat prints but ones that were full, meaning that the prints could go into deep blacks but still stay predominantly in the grays without strong highlights. With Yountville I worked to do the same.  

What was printing like then? I had a darkroom carved out of a 1/2 bath in my apartment, with the enlarger mounted above the toilet. Turn 180 degrees from the enlarger and bang you were right in front of the developer, sitting in a sink that I'd made that was about 8 feet long. Two to three minutes and then the stop bath to the left and then into the fixer, agitated, then white light on after 45 seconds or so. Look at the print, decide what could be improved, turn off the light, go back to the enlarger, pull out another piece of paper and repeat. And so on, often for several prints. After fixing, the print went into a holding tray of water. When it was time to final wash the prints I would put them one at a time into a Zone VI plexiglass washer for 10 minutes or so, then into fixer remover which also had rapid selenium toner in it, then back for a final wash of 20 to 30 minutes, then the prints were squeegeed and placed face down on a plastic screen drying rack. The prints would dry over night.

Yountville has been shown numerous times and is included as the first series in the monograph "American Series", published in 2006.

I spent most of the winter of 2012 in and near Yuma, Arizona. This was in the months directly after I retired from teaching and it was a time of tremendous relief at being finished with teaching and my commitments as a full professor at Northeastern University. 

I had a great time in Yuma. A couple of friends came out to visit, I met new friends and had many wonderful times photographing and making discoveries in an area new to me.

One of those was the Goldfield Ghost Town, about an hour outside of Phoenix in Apache Junction.

I arrived early so the tourist town wasn't open yet but I found a guy in one of the buildings and asked him if I could walk around and take pictures. He said, "sure, help yourself."

Sometimes the act of making a series is simply a continuing discovery and Goldfield Ghost Town was just that. 

This is a remarkable place, made richer by wonderful all kinds of weird things going on.

I walked around the village, looking for the next frame while shooting the current one, working to keep a logical path through the place and also to notice every little thing I could see.

I also did a few unusual things for me, such as:

It is quite rare for me to point up like that in a series but I felt it was justified in order to isolate the broken wind vane up against the sky.

This one, of an old fire tuck with its two hoses gave me pause as it was very beautiful in color:

( The way most of us work in black and white in the digital world is to shoot the pictures in color and then make a color conversion into black and white in post production. That is so very different than using black and white film in the camera. It can be wrenching to see colors go in an instant.

But sometimes one picture has to be sacrificed for the sake of the group and I felt this simply needed to be a black and white series so the final is in black and white.

This is one of the more crucial photographs in the set. It is an old type setting machine and effectively straddles the fence of older times giving way to newer technologies. A nice incongruity.

The stairs above is a picture I had made before:

years before at the Northampton, MA Fair Grounds but in a different enough way as I felt it was okay here and the light was gorgeous.

Another core picture: the cactus, the surreal painting, the pattern on the door, the sign "Gallery" and then finally the word "...very".

As the series begins to conclude, I worked to summarize and then to finish indicating the loop back to the beginning:

The full series is on the site at: Goldfield Ghost Town.

The series  is nineteen images. The prints are on Canson Photographique Baryta paper and the prints are 21 x 14 inches.

I just added a series to the site: Colville, WA. This was a vacated farm off of Route 395 Northwest of Spokane. The farm was south of Colville a few miles. Why photograph this?

Let me show you:

Here's a cropped version of the above photograph:

This notice was taped to the front door of the farmhouse. I was there on July 19, eighteen days after the farm's last inspection. How could I not photograph there?

This was clearly a dairy farm.

What back story was there about this abandoned place? How many generations had worked the farm? How many decades had the animals been milked or herded out to graze? How many barn cats had licked fresh milk from a saucer put out by the farmer? How many years had the fields been cut, the hay baled as feed for the next  winter? How many Thanksgiving dinners had been eaten around the old table in  the kitchen covered with a checkerboard table cloth?

What causes someone to abandon a farm? Had the farmer gotten too old, perhaps had a heart attack one cold and dark winter's morning lifting hay bales to feed his cows? Had the farmer's wife been too old and weak to carry on after he died? Had the farmer taken out too many loans with the bank as he was less able so they were forced to foreclose the place? Or had the farmer and his wife been simply unable to pay the bills and left? 

Of course, we will never know what the end to this sad story is. But I could pay my respects to a place that had great history and resonated with a past life that was active and vibrant. I see children playing tag in the backyard on a hot early evening one  July 4th weekend, with fried chicken on a platter being brought out of the kitchen by the farmer's wife, so pretty in her late 30's, wiping sweat from her forehead and wearing that apron he bought her last Christmas.  I see the young family down at the Chevy dealer in Colville climbing into their new bright red pickup truck, the one that lasted fourteen years. I see their young son, hitting  a homer his senior year in high school that summer before he went to Vietnam and never coming back, blown to hell by a land mine. I see lemon aid in a big pitcher and pancakes on a plate and the family huddled around the console TV watching that astronaut walk on the moon. I can hear little Betty struggling to learn to play the piano, repeating "Heart and Soul" so many times they all screamed at her to quit. And I see her opening the door to her date Mitch years later the night of her prom. Where did all that go? Does all that amount to nothing here in this overgrown corner of the state of Washington next to highway 395 south of Colville?

So much life, I am sure, so much history gone, now the place abandoned. 

So sad.

How could I not photograph here?

This is part two of my writing about a series I made in 2006 called: Thompson, CT. In that first post I wrote about the photographs I made mostly along the first row of housing and then stopped with a picture at the end of the row.

Here I'm almost in the same place and show, for the first time, by turning left slightly, what is behind the row of housing. Beyond the sheds in the backyard you can see that the view opens out with some sort of field and then there are trees in the far background. I've tried to contain the picture by channeling you past the tree on the left and the edge of the back of the building on the right to take your eye farther back.This picture is predictive, in that I am photographing where I am heading.

This one looks back slightly to show a shed intersected by a diagonal tree and the back of one of the housing units on the right side.

Here, for the first time, I have left it all behind and am showing the river, the row of trees on the far shore, a little bit of the edge of the baseball field, and the fence that contains it. This was something of an experiment, to try to move into a separate subset of work within the larger series, a little like some music in the middle of a song that is hugely different, perhaps a different tempo or rhythm. In more recent series I have done this with a switch from black and white to color as in: 'Sconset, Nantucket 2012

Another tree trunk prominent in the frame, large enough to block the scene a little. I love the texture of the tree itself and the early spring sunlight.

And here, finally, some purity of form, simply the water and the trees:

After this recess, this respite from the rigor of the row hosting, it is now time to get back to it, so here, again, in a picture that is somewhat confrontational, is this:

Perhaps slightly more contextual than the last one but I felt it was important to bring the viewer back to the overall series.

So, for the rest of the Thompson, CT series we slide along the third row, the pictures showing things that interested me along the way:

Remember what I said in the first post (Thompson) about this being a series that refers photographs to photographs within the series? This one does that.

For me this is another "reality better than fiction" picture. The beater Cadillac, as large as an aircraft carrier, glowing in the sunlight with a simply gorgeous and climactic tree shooting out behind it is just about the most wonderful thing I have ever seen. I know, severe hyperbole will get you nowhere but come on, you  have to agree. Love that tree.

We are beginning to wind things down here in this very large, for me, series of 37 prints. But the "bunny on the door" picture is the image that is closet to its subject, and for good reason, as it speaks to Easter, which is over. The bunny is hung there as if at a gallows, with a noose around its neck. I remember moving to place the  building's reflection in the window to reference this picture in the contextt of the overall development.

This picture refers to the fourth in the series and signals that I have now come back to the same area where I began. It is a "same but different" picture in that the structure is the same but it is now flipped, as in a mirror image.

Finally, in the last photograph, this is the same scene that was partially obscured by the circle in the first image of the series, here: 

This gives you the full view without the intrusion and is my effort to try to bring to resolution and rest the situation of the housing development and its existing three rows of buildings clearly seen here.

Were I to critique the series I would most likely focus on its ending in that I am not   sure it gives the resolution one would hope for. I remember wrestling with the concept back when I made the prints. Is this sufficient, to leave some questions unanswered?  I know I felt so at the time. I put this series to bed over 9 years ago and would not go back to rework something to far in my past.

As always, I welcome your comments.

Before I finish I want to mention that the Griffin Museum of Photography in Winchester, MA is holding its annual Focus Awards this Saturday, October 19. (Focus Awards)

This is a big event for the museum but also a very big event  for all of photography. If you can, please come. It is best to reserve space beforehand by calling the museum.