Where in the world is Neal Rantoul?

Factory Butte, Hanksville, Utah 2010 ©Neal Rantoul

Neal Rantoul stopped by the Panopticon Gallery today. He has been on a "radical sabbatical" leave from Northeastern University since May, 2009 and will resume teaching this fall.

He told me that it has been a full and productive year. While the year before was spent recovering from surgery on a ruptured quad tendon above his left knee, Neal worked hard to rebuild his strength over the winter months with physical therapy and weekly sessions with a personal trainer.

In June 2009 he made another trip to the Palouse, an area near Pullman, Washington with a high concentration of wheat fields. He photographed green wheat fields from the ground and from a chartered plane at about 2,000 feet. In the summer he split his time between Martha's Vineyard and Port Clyde, Maine, shooting and kayaking. In September he flew to Italy where he worked, with the support of a grant, for over six weeks in the towns of Trieste, Bologna and just above Rome at Viterbo. Driving a rented Renault Cubo and staying in apartments, he was able to photograph daily with good weather and great results. He is now working on a new book that will combine these new images with black and white photographs that he shot in the 1990's.

This past January, Neal was back on an airplane, the destination, Austin, Texas. While eating too much BBQ seems to be a common problem there, the light was great, the temperature mild, and Austin is simply a fabulous place. By April he headed to Moab, Utah for three weeks where he combined aerial photography with ground-based photography. With over 2,000 photographs to edit and print, Neal is in the process of organizing the work and plans on making an on-demand book of the Utah pictures.

To see more of Neal's photographs, visit our website: www.panopticongallery.com or www.nealrantoul.com.

Upcoming Exhibition

Paris/Prague: Tales from Two Cities
May 20 – July 7, 2010
Reception: Thursday, June 3, 2010, 5:30 - 7:30pm

Paul Ickovic, Paris (Robert Delpire), 1990

Two of the most iconic and classical cities in Europe are featured in this exhibition by photographers Paul Ickovic and Jason Landry. Working in the style of Henri Cartier-Bresson and Brassai, Ickovic’s black and white photographs are captive moments of the capital cities Paris, France and Prague, Czechoslovakia during the 1980’s and early 1990’s. Inspired by his own family heritage, Ickovic’s images have an autobiographical flair and tell much of his own story through the cities and the subjects he photographs; narratives from which a viewer can become engaged and relate to. Ickovic stands at a critical distance from his subjects: close enough to attract their gaze, while maintaining the eye of a voyeur — recording moments that are never staged nor cropped.

Landry’s counterbalance is what he describes in his series The River has Two Faces. Through his journeys over a five-year period to Paris, France, Landry strolled the banks of the river Seine as a contemporary flâneur, looking, seeing and documenting moments that resonated within him. The term flâneur comes from the French. It has no exact English translation, but is generally defined as ‘an idler or lounger, one who strolls.’ Through his photographs, he sought to capture the duality and split that divides us all. While walking the Seine, a bystander approached him and explained, “two banks divide the river Seine. The right bank is considered the financial and economic section of Paris. The left bank, for many years, has been referred to as the artistic/bohemian area of the city.” It struck him that this division of structure and culture, from businessman to an artist, was just what he had become. Landry states, “I am forever connected to the images, and through the image, a part of the place.”