The Boston based region that exists in the art of photography, with all that entails, is very rich. It is also my home.There are many many schools that teach photography here, many artists practicing it, several galleries that specialize in it, two non-profits that show it and provide programming for it, museums that show it and collect it, numerous A-list artists that live in it and a long history of exhibitions and significant events centered around it.

That being said, it has had and continues to have its problems. The region includes for all intents and purposes areas as far south as Providence and as far north as Portland, Maine and as far west as Worcester (try going east and you're in the water). It has a core museum (the Museum of Fine Art in Boston, the MFA) which is classically negligent about local talent, galleries don't sell well, the two non-profits, the Photographic Resource Center (PRC) in Boston and the Griffin Museum of Photography in Winchester are under funded and can be under appreciated at times though both have wonderful programming.

Nevertheless, I am today writing to praise one of our heroes, Phillip Prodger. Phillip has been the curator of photography at the Peabody Essex Museum (PEM) in Salem  for about 6 years. He is leaving for the National Portrait Gallery in London. Philip has done a really tremendous amount to promote photography to a broader public and to make truly wonderful and important exhibitions at the PEM.

Imagine a major museum having as its photo curator a person who increased awareness of and appreciation for photography to a wide audience, who was accessible and helpful to many individual local photographers, who knows his field     thoroughly, is warm and personable and you can sum up Phillip.

It is with mixed feelings that I wish Phillip well. He is needed here and will be sorely missed. But I also wish him the best of possible times in London. His successor at PEM has very large shoes to fill.

All the best, Phillip.

I just got back from Hanover, NH where I helped judge a local photo contest. Lia Rothstein, Amy Thompson Avishai and I weighed in with our votes in this amateur contest called the Annual Elden Murray Photography Competition now in its 38th consecutive year.

We had lots of help and a great crew of volunteers to make our job easier and judging run smoother. We had many categories to look at:

Prizes and/or Awards will be given in each category.

1) Landscape or Cityscape: "Scenic" images with or without buildings.
2) Animals, birds, insects: Both wild and domestic creatures; includes macros of any creature.                                                                                                            3)People: Portraits both formal and informal, groups, sports and performance events –anything in which the primary interest is the people.                                              4) Pictorial: Still lifes, objects, flowers, gardens, architectural details, etc.                  5) Experimental, abstract, non-representational.                                                       6) Photographs taken by people under 18 years of age.

Most contestants will have their work on view in the exhibition coming up next week and the prize winners will be announced then. Congratulations to all who participated! There was some wonderful work which made our task very difficult at times.

BTW: I don't think it got over 10 degrees above zero all day. On the drive up from Boston there was snow drifting across the highway as it was very windy too. Did I try to photograph? Yes, but it was a very quick try. Ah, winter in the Northeast.

Pay Back. Revenge. Retribution. Condemnation. How sweet it is…..

Intrigued? 

Some of my fiercest fought battles were done by outlasting my adversaries. I could not beat Peter Serenyi at Northeastern, chair of the department, not while I was under tenure review. Behind a thin veneer of cordiality was a layer of mutual dislike. Early on I did have some knock-down screaming fights with him but I learned to hold these in check as he was irrational and I wasn't tenured yet. My motto: lay low and wait. He did retire, and when he did my ability to influence decisions towards positive outcomes for the photography program increased dramatically. 

But, on to the story. This one takes place in Boston. In 1982 I had taught one year at Northeastern and was teaching each fall at Harvard. Things were going well. I was married, my daughter was born in December, we were renovating a house and I was planning a big move, which included dismantling two darkrooms: a color one and a black and white one, both with enlargers to handle 4 x 5 film, a Besseler and an Omega. The color darkroom I'd built for my wife so she could print her graduate thesis for MIT. It had a 20 inch color print drier that ran on a dedicated 220 line that could heat the whole apartment, and often did.

A former colleague from NESOP (New England School of Photography) named Steve Rose approached me with an idea to do a portfolio of my pictures. Steve taught photo history at NESOP . We chose a group of  2 1/4 infrared and conventional black and white pictures from Bermuda for the content.  I had made several trips to Bermuda recently and had work from there he and I liked for this project. I made the toned prints, 156 in total on 16 x 20 inch paper using Ilford's Galerie, which adds up to an edition of twelve with one artist proof. He was to do the rest. A special white box was designed and ordered, board was purchased and, on a very tight deadline, I made the prints that spring. It also was a very full summer coming up that year. I was working on a one man show to open in August at the RI School of Design Museum and I had prints in a summer show at Light Gallery in NY. I remember the printing for the portfolio as being brutal. Relentless, boring, monotonous; printing that many of the same image is always tough. They were also difficult prints to make as I was toning with multiple toners in those days. I remember I threw my back out printing that spring.

I delivered the prints to Steve on time, who lived and worked here:

Wait a minute….lived where? There is no there there. Actually, I just made that picture a few days ago and yes they are tearing down the building where Steve Rose lived and where I delivered the prints.

I love that part where the kid says, "wait a minute" in the movie Princess Bride when Peter Falk is reading the story to him. It seems our young hero and his princess bride were kissing and the kid couldn't take it. All of sudden we're back to the kid's bedroom and his grand father is sitting there with the book in his hand. Stops the story right in its tracks.

I think of this picture as doing that, stopping the narrative in mid stride. Steve Rose's building is being torn down in January 2014 right in the center of the frame. If that means I can erase having to think of Steve Rose every time I go by there, then that is fine with me. But, let's get back to our story taking place in 1982. 

Back to then.

As I said, I delivered the prints. Up to that point I thought we were good. Steve assured me all was well, the boxes were in and his crew were all set do the mounting, matting and assembling. A few weeks later I was about to leave for Europe when I got a call from one of Steve's crew that Steve was leaving town, that he wasn't coming back and that I'd better come over right away and get what I could of the portfolio as it all was going to be trashed if I didn't.

OMG!

I did just that. I went over, got my prints, some of which were mounted and matted, the boxes and some extra board. Steve had gone by then. Calls to him were not returned. I never saw Steve Rose again. Lucky for him as I would've decked him. The guy hightailed it out of town with creditors on his tail. He owed everyone. And had lied to us all. To say nothing of a large project left in a shambles.

Scandal. Intrigue. Shocking Incident. Transgression.

In the small Boston-based community back then of artist photographers, gossip prevailed. What a mess. What happened with Rantoul and Rose? I took off for Europe, relieved to be free of it for a while.  I came back to pull the portfolio together and, over the years, was successful in either donating it to collections or selling it. Two remain and the portfolio is in the permanent collections of the Addison Gallery of American Art and the Stiftung, which is the photography collection at the Museum of Art in Zurich, Switzerland. Plus, I donated a copy to my high school and several are in private collections.

Back to 2014, to Steve's place being felled by the wrecking ball. Finally, the bad taste in my mouth of Mr. Steve Rose is gone, along with the place I delivered those prints to a lifetime ago, 32 years to be exact. Good riddance to the building being reduced to dust and to Steve being long gone.

You might be interested in seeing what all the fuss was about. I will bring the Bermuda Portfolio to you soon.

I hesitate about going too far down the nostalgia path but this phrase would come up often among us as we were younger: "let's go shooting!" As students, when we had a day with no classes and a deadline looming of having to show new work in class, we'd often join up to drive someplace or sometimes just drive, looking for things to photograph. I don't know that it ever occurred to us that this was so random as to practically insure failure but it was always definitely a good time. Our approach wasn't very systematic in those days. For me there weren't "series" or "projects" or specific places I would go to make pictures yet, there were just adventures. I would get going early, pick up a friend and off we'd go. 

Of course there were discoveries, we'd come across things and places that were magical. My friend Rob Gooblar found a whole parking lot full of Airstream trailers, their stainless steel curves irresistible in brilliant sunlight, I found an abandoned drive-in theatre, still there today,

on Rt 146 in Millbury, a junkyard in Cranston, gravel pits, abandoned buildings, Cape Cod off season, ski areas in May, developments under construction, over passes on highways, gas stations and small town main streets, fields of corn, Crane's Beach in a snow storm, the Berkshires and farther out, the Adirondacks, the reservoirs out Rt 6 from Providence headed towards Hartford, and on and on and on.

After we finished school this tradition of hooking up to go photograph continued. I also moved it into my teaching and throughout my whole career hauled students all over on field trips to make pictures. At Northeastern these were known as PFAYVA trips (Photographic Foundation for the Advancement of Young Visual Artists ), a members group co-created by Andrea Greitzer and Scott Merritt, both photo students. I did field trips at Harvard and New England School of Photography too. The PFAYVA trips at Northeastern were legendary. Membership wasn't hard: if you were in a photo class or you'd had a photo course you were a member. It grew in the 90's into real trips with weekends spent in Vinylhaven, an island in Maine, another in Savannah, Georgia and practically yearly trips to Martha's Vineyard and Block Island. One trip to the Vineyard was so large we took out the whole Youth Hostel early in the spring before they opened for the season.

My whole career I've photographed alone, sometimes for weeks or months on end, and sometimes with friends, students, former students, groups and just one or two. Then there is photographing with someone who's not a photographer. This can be harder and is usually not my favorite thing. I have also photographed with a guide and this can be wonderful as the guide knows the best places to go to. I advise this if you're in a new area and don't have unlimited time; best is a photo guide.

What would we talk about as two or three of us would take off for a day when we were grad students? Our teachers, the other students, and what photography we'd seen or wanted to see by this artist or that artist, of course. We'd always be pissed at what a teacher said or didn't say, whether they'd liked our work or were indifferent to it (this was the worst) or didn't like it, which actually conferred a brief notoriety followed by a "What the fuck do you suppose he meant when he said…..?"question amongst us as we drove by countless possibilities for pictures, things definitely not pictures and poor attention span meaning we could be going past photo Nirvana out there but we'd never know it as we were too busy talking talking talking. Great times and missed. Far better to have had the experiences than not to have had them. 

As 2013 draws to a close I thought I would take a stab at pulling together my own "best of" list. 

Can I do that? Is it fair? What about the great ones that are left out? Isn't that BS, to establish an artificial construct around a time that encompasses an arbitrary twelve months? Of course, to all of those reactions but that's just cynicism from "glass half empty" people. I am not really a cynic, even though I find maintaining confidence in a dysfunctional federal government very challenging right now.

"What the hell is he talking about?" I can hear you say. Well, if you're an active photographer and your practice encompasses quite a bit of diversity and you have a vehicle by which you can skim through your work (mine is one of several libraries in Aperture) why wouldn't you? This leads to my perspective talk, which was a standard one with advanced students where I taught.

Perhaps you can relate to this: when we create something new, particularly something we are invested in, it is fascinating, intriguing, earth shattering and exciting. I don't know about you but I love much of my new work, especially if it is qualitatively excellent and has moved me forward as a kind of discovery. But do I have a true perspective on it? No way. Work needs time put away, put on the back shelf, so to speak, to rest, for us to see it in relationship to all our other work or other work in general. Therefore, making a "best of " list can make a great deal of sense as it gets us going back into pictures made eleven months ago to visit what we were doing and what we were seeing back then.

So, that's my plan: to assemble a "Best of 2013" group of photographs that may be seen as prints in a portfolio or may not, I don't know yet (yes, that is a tip of the iceberg statement and is something I'll be looking at in a separate post soon — to print it or not to print it). I do know that 2013 has been an amazing year for me photographically. There will be no ground rules, no restrictions, except that if the list becomes 300 images, that's way out of line. Let's say a maximum of 24, an average of two a month, to broadly summarize a year's work.

As I work extensively in series, these will be single prints, pictures not picked out of my series work. Photographs I like but not attached to any specific body of work. A daunting task as I have shot about 10,000 images this year so far.

This sound like it might be a challenge to you as well? Well, that would be up to you. If something shorter is more manageable, that would be fine too. But it is a good idea to work on something that goes back a ways, so that you'll be able to look at it a little like someone else made it.

Here are my first two, from January, 2013. 

Old studio

New studio

Well, that didn't work. Last January I didn't shoot at all, as I was consumed by a studio move (those are  just snapshots) and preparing for a public event. Oh well. Let's try February:

Blank

Argh! Clearly this is going to be much harder than I thought. February I was in San Diego and shooting every day. How can I pick a few from so much? This turned out to be totally over whelming. I am learning at the sheer impossibility of having this thing work. Okay, before you laugh at me and move on, you try it. Go back to some period of time in the past year where you were shooting a lot and pick a few from that time. Good luck with that.

I know one way this might work. Get someone else to "edit you". This is very much like what a curator is often called upon to do. I may try that as I don't know if I can get myself down to 24 pictures made over the past year and be able to sleep at night.

We will revisit this topic soon, as I now have established a real test for myself: reduce too many pictures down to a manageable small group. I have a hunch I will change my own ground rules. I will most likely just start to put out pictures not seen before but that, I believe, warrant attention.

Stay tuned.