Gallery of photographs made in June 2019 and posted on the site the end of August 2019.

I have been photographing in the wheat growing region of SE Washington called the Palouse for 25 years.

Prints are 25 x 17 inches and may be seen by appointment through Insight Arts Manangement. Ask for Maru at: 

‭(978) 496-4901‬ or m.rantoul@gmail.com

The first  works made in the southeastern region of Washington State called the Palouse. Frequent subsequent trips total approximately 24. These were made with an 8 x 10 inch view camera.

Suggest searching for "wheat" in the blog and looking through the Gallery on the site page for numerous other Wheat projects of the next twenty years or so.

The orignal prints of this group were made as analog toned and archival black and white prints, by me, in 1997. They are 16 x 20 inches in size

Artist Statement: Wheat

Neal Rantoul

I first started photographing in the Palouse area of southeastern Washington in the mid 90’s and have been back most years since. It is my longest running project.

The work has evolved over the years, going from first black and white to color, from large format to digital, and from being based on the ground to including pictures made from the air. I have also photographed the area through the seasons.

In earlier writing about the project I referenced some of the great contemporary landscape photographers such as Robert Adams and Joe Deal, who was a good friend, and also cited Eugene Atget for the single mindedness of his intent. As a career artist I work in many different genres but this is the one that is perhaps the core vehicle of expression for my landscape work. While it has been challenging to find new approaches to this most wonderful of places, it also has been a privilege. Looking back at so much work now, I see more subtle changes from the earlier days to the present for I believe some of the basic principles in working there still apply: it is a landscape almost without scale due to few trees and little to reference size, the pictures can convey the movement of the wheat in the breeze at the same time as show the stillness and static nature of the topography, allowing photographs that convey sharpness and blur due to movement in the same image simultaneously and finally, in the more recent work since about 2000, colors, on their own, but also in relationship to each other.

I am very excited by the newest work from the summer of 2014, as it represents a shift in intention with an evolved sense of the fields' function and their form where the work is perhaps its most abstract. Some of this work references the place by including a barn, a farm machine or trees, while some does not. Hence: Function and Form, the title for the new work. Function and Form constitutes a subset, which is, I hope, a powerful one, of the overall work made over the two-week shoot.

Neal Rantoul

July 2014

Gallery of photographs made in June 2019 and posted on the site the end of August 2019.

I have been photographing in the wheat growing region of SE Washington called the Palouse for 25 years.

Prints are 25 x 17 inches and may be seen by appointment through Insight Arts Manangement. Ask for Maru at: 

‭(978) 496-4901‬ or m.rantoul@gmail.com

Artist Statement: Wheat

Neal Rantoul

I first started photographing in the Palouse area of southeastern Washington in the mid 90’s and have been back most years since. It is my longest running project.

The work has evolved over the years, going from first black and white to color, from large format to digital, and from being based on the ground to including pictures made from the air. I have also photographed the area through the seasons.

In earlier writing about the project I referenced some of the great contemporary landscape photographers such as Robert Adams and Joe Deal, who was a good friend, and also cited Eugene Atget for the single mindedness of his intent. As a career artist I work in many different genres but this is the one that is perhaps the core vehicle of expression for my landscape work. While it has been challenging to find new approaches to this most wonderful of places, it also has been a privilege. Looking back at so much work now, I see more subtle changes from the earlier days to the present for I believe some of the basic principles in working there still apply: it is a landscape almost without scale due to few trees and little to reference size, the pictures can convey the movement of the wheat in the breeze at the same time as show the stillness and static nature of the topography, allowing photographs that convey sharpness and blur due to movement in the same image simultaneously and finally, in the more recent work since about 2000, colors, on their own, but also in relationship to each other.

I am very excited by the newest work from the summer of 2014, as it represents a shift in intention with an evolved sense of the fields' function and their form where the work is perhaps its most abstract. Some of this work references the place by including a barn, a farm machine or trees, while some does not. Hence: Function and Form, the title for the new work. Function and Form constitutes a subset, which is, I hope, a powerful one, of the overall work made over the two-week shoot.

Neal Rantoul

July 2014

Artist Statement: Wheat

Neal Rantoul

I first started photographing in the Palouse area of southeastern Washington in the mid 90’s and have been back most years since. It is my longest running project.

The work has evolved over the years, going from first black and white to color, from large format to digital, and from being based on the ground to including pictures made from the air. I have also photographed the area through the seasons.

In earlier writing about the project I referenced some of the great contemporary landscape photographers such as Robert Adams and Joe Deal, who was a good friend, and also cited Eugene Atget for the single mindedness of his intent. As a career artist I work in many different genres but this is the one that is perhaps the core vehicle of expression for my landscape work. While it has been challenging to find new approaches to this most wonderful of places, it also has been a privilege. Looking back at so much work now, I see more subtle changes from the earlier days to the present for I believe some of the basic principles in working there still apply: it is a landscape almost without scale due to few trees and little to reference size, the pictures can convey the movement of the wheat in the breeze at the same time as show the stillness and static nature of the topography, allowing photographs that convey sharpness and blur due to movement in the same image simultaneously and finally, in the more recent work since about 2000, colors, on their own, but also in relationship to each other.

I am very excited by the newest aerial work from the summer of 2014, as it represents a shift in intention with an evolved sense of the fields' function and their form where the work is perhaps its most abstract. Some of this work references the place by including a barn, a farm machine or trees, while some does not. Hence: Function and Form, the title for the new work. Function and Form constitutes a subset, which is, I hope, a powerful one, of the overall work made over the two-week shoot.

Neal Rantoul

July 2014

The book on the series Yountville is now out and available. This is the third book in the 12 book series planned for works of mine in black and white from the 80's and 90's. Yountville represents another shift in that it is from a small town in the Napa Valley of California that is lush and overgrown. The  7 x 7 inch book is for sale by ordering directly: nrantoul@comcast.net.

Each book is signed and numbered and is for sale for $25 plus shipping.

Yountville is on the website: http://www.nealrantoul.com/projects/yountville-ca-1981

The Hershey pictures were made at a time when I was expanding my understanding of what was possible within a series project. I had made the Portland, Maine series earlier in the year and the Oakesdale, Washington series the previous summer. This was a farm that looked abandoned, off the side of the road on the way out of Hershey on another spring break trip to photograph, heading back home to Boston with a friend. We stopped and photographed for a while. It was cold and gray as much of March is.

The Portland photographs were made on the start of a spring break from teaching at Northeastern in late March,1996.

The photographs are represented in the monograph "American Series" and has been shown many times.

The original prints are darkroom made silver gelatin prints about 13 inches square and are selenium toned.

See page 1 for a description of this work. Prints are 25 x 17 inches on Red River Polar Matte.

Printed in an edition of five. 

The Nantucket pictures are the first “series” I did. Made, over  30 years ago, it is amazing that making this one modest group of pictures began a whole career.

I was teaching a summer photography workshop on the island of Martha’s Vineyard and took the students on a field trip to Nantucket for the day for a change of pace. When the ferry landed, I told the students to go make pictures and I would see them late in the afternoon to head back to Martha’s Vineyard. Off they went and so did I.

I had no real idea that something major was going to happen but it was one of those times when much of the work I had done until then was preparing me for how I would photograph that day. It was right: the light, the scale, the camera, my seeing, my effort to try to make a group of pictures that would connect to each other in a specific sequence to make a whole that was larger than its individual parts. After a few hours and several rolls of film I knew I’d had a breakthrough and broke down in tears when telling my experience to a friend on the ferry ride back home. Several months later the prints were finished and the next year they were shown in a summer group show at Light Gallery in NYC and in a one-man show at the RI School of Design Museum in Providence, RI. But more important to me was that I had found a way to make pictures that still serves me well today.