"Seeing" was the title for a book colleague and art historian Norma Steinberg and I conceived of and worked on in the 90s. It was written into a prospectus and submitted to a publisher. The book was never published.

The publisher we selected had been pursuing me for years, wanting me to write a photo textbook. Once we submitted the proposal they modified the book so extensively it was really no longer our book anymore. I believe they wanted our names and academic credentials as validation but not the book as we proposed. We walked away.

What was it? Seeing used my photographs and rationale for the way I worked as a foundation for a logic of looking at things photographically. It delved into photographs potential as way to arrive at a photographic vision and a photographic  philosophy of seeing. 

Norma was a colleague and friend and a remarkable addition to our Department at Northeastern. She taught our photo history course and always came to my classes' final critiques. She brought a unique perspective that included historical context. 

The book was also specifically about looking at black and white photographs, although chapter 5 was to be titled "Color" to deal with my practice of always toning my black and white photographs.

I'm going to quote from the prospectus, written by Steinberg. This one, the proposal for chapter 7 called: 

The Personal

Throughout the history of photography, we read the same questions and responses about the nature of the medium-that it is either a mechanical medium of which we expect a truthful representation of reality, or that it is an art form, which is less truthful. As an artist Rantoul squeezes his pictures from within his own experiences, preferences, and feelings. It is a subjective process, involving decisions about where to go, when to stop to photograph, how to position the camera, what light to use, how to expose the film, how to process the film for the control of contrast, what size, tonality and color to make the print and so on. That is what is meant by photographers when they say "make photographs" rather than "take photographs" and it belies the idea that photography is an objective medium.

Or here, where she's explaining Fast and Slow (my term):

There are two meanings to the phrase "fast and slow." The first, more poetic, meaning is concerned with a directorial approach. A "slow" picture is one with obstructions or challenges to the viewer's ability to move through the space of the picture. A "fast" picture, on the other hand, permits the viewer's eye to move into visual depth. Sometimes the vertical lines move toward the center and at other times verticals bend outward. Slow photographs are planar and frontal, and often contain a visual screen across the picture plane. They may even be abstract, as for example, the New York or Gloucester pictures of Aaron Siskin. They may seem planar, as for example when a Rantoul landscape eliminates the sky and removes the sense of a horizon. In this definition of "fast and slow," the photographer's sense of design becomes important.  Rantoul states: "A fast picture has visual depth with strong foreground-to-background information. My 'fast' pictures have prominent foregrounds and acute convergence." Sometimes this is the direct result of the equipment used because certain cameras have a propensity to tilt the scene at the edge. The camera as a definer of form will be discussed in several places throughout the book.

I'd correct this last by clarifying that it is probably the width of the lens that makes some photographs "faster".

The second meaning of the phrase is more literal-the actual time it takes to make the pictures, the choreography of the artist's movements through space, and the significance of that timing to the final work. This structural meaning of "fast and slow", relates to those bodies of work that take months or even years to complete as compared to the spontaneous series pictures described in Chapter One.

It is important to keep in mind that we were still firmly in the analog world of conventional film-based photography in the mid 90s and using prints made in my darkroom as our foundation. 

Of course, we should have moved on to other publishers as we had a viable concept. I think we were so crushed at how this one publisher mislead us we gave up.

Last, it was a wonderful experience working with Norma on this project. She forced me to be focused, to express my concepts clearly and what I'd been teaching for years into a cohesive and cogent sequence of ideas. 

As always your comments are welcome.

Mistakes I've made. In photography, too many to list. Some big, some small. From underexposing, overdeveloping, losing negatives, losing files, making unintentionally blurry images from a plane at 1000 feet up, and so on. 

I will share one big one: a trip to the Bahamas in the 80s for a spring break vacation with family, my daughter Maru about 2 years old. Being who I am I brought a 4 x 5 camera and 100 sheets of Kodak Plus-X film. I managed to get away several times and shot most of the whole box, changing out exposed sheets of film each night in a dark closet with fresh sheets so as to be ready to shoot the next day. Back home in my darkroom, I set up to process the film, got my trays ready for development, turned off the lights, and ran my film from the developer to stop to fix and to rinse and then turned on the lights to see how these first sheets looked. As I did this I looked over to my right to see the remaining stack of sheets of exposed but undeveloped film sitting there on the counter underneath the enlarger. About 85 sheets of film: not back in their light-tight box, not protected from the light at all. All now blown.

That was a mistake made once and never again.

Of course, there are other categories of mistakes made over a long career: teaching mistakes, political and strategic mistakes, creative mistakes, exhibition mistakes, and a whole other category I won't go into here: personal mistakes.

For instance, very early in my career, I had a print accepted to a group show at MIT where Minor White ran the program. My image was accepted for exhibition by this great master. I felt honored that my image had passed before his eyes. The evening of the opening I arrived and started looking for my photograph only to find it prominently displayed, upside down!

One of the things all of us who are career artists do is promote a relationship with influential people. This means developing an association with curators, gallery directors, editors, art buyers, and, if working professionally, art directors. For me, this has meant repeatedly showing work often over years to museum curators.  Twice, in a big way, this has affected my career when a curator up and left after seeing my work over an extended period. One went from being a photo curator to the head of the museum while seeing my work once a year for several years. Then having said to me she was giving me a one-man show told me she was leaving to go into banking. All right. In working with her replacement I had a new just-out-of-grad-school curator.  I had someone assigned to show my work who had no understanding of it and no history of looking at my work over a period of years. The show was less powerful and persuasive because of this. 

One more: in making aerial photographs of the Cape and Martha's Vineyard one fall day I flew out of the Hyannis Airport in October at about 3 pm. The quantity of light in aerial work is paramount as you must work with a fast shutter speed combined with at least some depth of field. As it got later, I was losing light, raising my ISO and lowering my shutter speed.  Most of the files I shot that day were blurry. I try to make aerial photographs now in the morning when the light is increasing.

I have always found photography challenging, part of its appeal. There are so very many ways you can screw up. I would often tell students it wasn't the mistakes so much, it was the failure to learn from them that was tragic. There is something so inevitable and final in an image swooping onto your film or sensor. At some fast shutter opening of, say, 1/500 of a second, the image is fully formed, fixed as in stone. What are your chances that this is great? Very low. 

Let me finish with this: what is your intention with your work? And in that process are you specific and disciplined, methodically planning and calculating each step to achieve your goal? Or are you impulsive, working sporadically, haphazardly accruing disparate images over time? I suspect that most of us are a little of both, at times being careful and calculated and at others just picking up our camera and winging it. I would presume one goal would be to make fewer mistakes, and waste our limited time less. Perhaps some planning and forethought isn't such a bad thing?   

Being fluent and practiced is key, of course. The same camera, a known lens so that you can sublimate the gear and work without logistics and circumstances getting in your way. After all, you're trying to be clear-headed and perceptive. Make it as easy on yourself as you can by knowing what you're doing. Being a professional or a career photographer is a very different thing than being an amateur who picks up a camera only occasionally. Photography's hard, as you've read from me before. Figure out ways to make it work better for the materials and situations you find yourself in. Really good photography is made by people who have discipline and understand that this is work. Rewarding work and work that can be really fun, but work nevertheless.

Just quickly, I couldn't help but share this from Petapixel this morning.

Olympus (OM System) with a built-in graduated filter. Newer cameras are going to start including not only this but all sorts of AI. Many of the things that we take for granted our smartphones can do, newer cameras will incorporate. This means a landscape shot of the highlands in Scotland will be enhanced right out of the chute. Will the original un-enhanced image still be there as a reference? Don’t know, maybe not. I for one do not want a camera company interjecting its own controls onto my photograph. Still, I’d be willing to bet that a newer photographer would define the enhanced vs. un-enhanced image as being much better. Slippery slope for sure. Another pin drops in the end of photography as we know it. Ka-ching.

This is the second in a two-post piece on my screwup one day photographing the Black Water Dam in southern NH in the late 80s.

I packed the gear in the back of the car and began to drive out to the highway. I thought I might drive into Manchester, a nearby city, as I knew that there was a camera store there. Maybe they would have the Bogen connector plate I needed. Maybe the day wouldn't be a total wash and I could go back to Black Water Dam to photograph.

I drove into town, parked on a side street, got out of the car, and, as I was crossing the street heading for the camera store, looked over my right shoulder to see an older, somewhat beaten-up pickup truck parking behind my car. I could see it was a woman behind the wheel and she was parking a whole space behind my car on the street, which was on a hill. Both my car and her truck were facing down the hill. No problem, right? Well, she got out of her truck, locked it and started to walk down the sidewalk as I stood there and watched the truck quietly start to move forward on its own, building speed as it rolled, heading for my car. Surprising how much speed a small pickup truck can gain when coasting downhill in just 15 feet or so. Bang! It hit my car, launching it forward into the car I had parked behind, which now had risen up on my hood. After all this, seeming like out of a movie, there was now complete silence. I ran over to find my rear bumper shoved into the rear trunk of the car, the rear tailgate glass shattered and the front bumper barely visible under the rear of the sedan that now resided halfway up on the hood of my car. There was a little steam rising from the area of the engine of my car and a small puddle forming on the pavement smelling like antifreeze.

I am sure I was disintegrating right there on the sidewalk in Manchester, NH that morning, unable to cope or maybe even comprehend what was going on. Those of you that know me know I am something of a car guy. Obsessively washing and waxing,  vacuuming and detailing. That's me. My car, which was a pristine and impeccable Nissan 300 ZX 2 +2 had now been hit from both ends in an accident that I had witnessed from across the street in what looked like a slow-motion sequence from a film.

If my day hadn't been shot before this little scene occurred, certainly it was done now. There ensued local cops, the pickup truck woman returning to find her vehicle had caused all the commotion, a call to my insurance company, a flatbed tow truck from AAA, a friend offering to come pick me up and get me home with the camera and gear, a decision to have the car towed to a close-by body shop to my home in Cambridge, and then months of repair and repainting before anything close to normality ensued. 

It seems the gods were not aligned in my favor that day. In all the years of photographing, on the street, close to home, on location, and traveling far and wide, I've never been so confused, disoriented, and displaced by a series of events as I was that day.

Occasionally, the blog reprints past posts if they've kept their relevancy. I believe this one is still pertinent:

https://nealrantoul.com/posts/a-disturbing-trend

From 2016, almost eight years ago. 

Let me know if you agree.