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Chappaqiddick
I'm old. Believe me, I know it. I'll be 70 in a few months. That fact may make it hard for you to take me seriously but bear with me for just this post. With age comes wisdom, right? What I want to write here is that I think the field of photography by those making art is changing in a disturbing way. Read on.
Photographic series or bodies of work are being explicated, explained, contextualized, rationalized and elevated with text or verbal rationales. You're thinking: so what? That's no big deal. Let me start with a short history and then let's take a look at current practice.  20 or 30 years ago, going to a photo show at MOMA or the Met, SF Modern, ID in Chicago or even the Whitney often meant you were confronted with a row of framed and matted photographs along with perhaps a brief statement from the show's curator that gave some biographical data on the photographer or maybe explained in what context the works were being shown. The titles of the work were usually the ...

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Neal Rantoul
Neal Rantoul
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Neal Rantoul is a career artist and educator. Retired from 30 years as head of the Photo Program at Northeastern University in Boston he is devoting his efforts full-time to making new pictures and bringing earlier work to a national and international audience. With over 50 one-person exhibitions over the length of his career, Rantoul has just finished two new shows that were in April 2013. One was at the Danforth Museum in Framingham, MA that opened in early April and another at the gallery that represents his work, Panopticon Gallery in Boston, that opened April 6. These two exhibitions emphasized more current work. The Danforth show was of “Wheat” and the Panopticon exhibition featured new aerial photographs of the islands off the coast of Massachusetts.
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