all photos ~ (embiggenable)
WHILE I WAS REVISITING THE BOOK AMERICAN SERIES by Neal Rantoul, I came across this in the book’s foreword:
[Neal Rantoul is]…more open and acccepting of the world as it presents itself to the camera and of one’s own passage through it…This is not only exemplified the places Rantoul chooses to photograph…but also by the fact that his serial photographs extend the fraction of one second of a single photograph into a sequence of moments…As our gaze and attention shift from one thing to another we start to collect impressions that merge into a sense of place.
What strikes me about this apparent “sense of place”*-a much used phrase that has populated the photo landscape since forever-is that, iMo, a photograph (or series thereof) of a place-Rantoul photographs 9 places-can at best convey only a sense of what that place looks like when photographed. I believe that to be the case cuz photographs are mute. Ya know, no sound, no oders, no ambient temperature, no air, and in this case, no people. One might even add, no zeitgeist. And don’t forget, there is no movement - they are still pictures after all.
But don’t me wrong, Rantoul’s photographs, to my and sensibilities, are visually engaging. Especially so as viewed in the book in serial form inasmuch as one does get a sense of his out-for-a-walkabout and making a picture every few steps.
That written, I have included a few photographs-spreads from my nearly complete book of my own place, aka: my house and home, to prove my point…as intriguing / interesting as these photographs might be to some, iMo, they are, at best, visually interesting pictures of my house and home. and what it looks like when photographed. Sure, sure, some viewers might intuit a couple of generalizations about me and my wife or the aesthetic that we create in our living environment and then cobble that together to construct a, iMo, facile sense of place.
But, if you really want to get from these pictures a sense of something, what they are most about is what, in the quotidian world, pricks my eye and visual sensibilities and how I chose to photograph it.