Neal Rantoul is a career artist and educator. Recently 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.
Rantoul’s work is extensively collected and is included in numerous prestigious collections such as the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, the Houston Museum of Fine Arts, the DeCordova Museum and Sculpture Park in Lincoln, MA, the Kunsthaus in Zurich, the Biblioteque’ Nationale in Paris, the High Museum in Atlanta, the Fogg Museum in Cambridge, The Princeton University Museum, The RI School of Design Museum of Art, The Center for Creative Photography in Tucson, The Boston Atheneum, etc. His work is also in the corporate collections of JP Morgan Guaranty Trust and Fidelity Investments, as well as numerous private collections. He is the recipient of many awards, grants and residencies including a Marion and Jasper Whiting Foundation grant, Lightwork and Hambidge Center for the Arts residencies, Visiting Artist at ICP’s Lake Como Workshop in Italy, among others.
Mr. Rantoul is continuing with an active teaching schedule which included a workshop in June 2012 for the Photographic Resource Center in Boston, a workshop on the "Expressive Landscape" for The Penland School of Crafts in 2012 in North Carolina and he taught a several day class for the New Hampshire Society of Photographic Artists at their annual retreat in September 2012 on Star Island off the coast off Portsmouth, NH. In spring 2013 Rantoul taught an architectural photography master class at the Penland School of Crafts.He co-taught the class with three prominent architectural photographers: Steve Rosenthal, Nick Wheeler and Peter Vanderwaker.
Mr. Rantoul is the author of several books of his photographs, among those are : "American Series" published in 2006, "Cabela's" published in 2009, "A Year" published in 2010, "Wheat" published in 2011, "Collections" published in 2011 and "Rock Sand Water", published in 2012. His most recoent book is called "Above" and it is aerial photographs of Martha's Vineyard made in 2012. His books may be purchased through this site.
Finally, Mr. Rantoul has recently stepped down as a board member of the Photographic Resource Center after almost six years and is on the Board of Corporators of the Griffin Museum of Photography in Winchester, MA serving on the Focus Award Committee, among others. He also reviews portfolios each year for the New England Portfolio Reviews (NEPR) held in Boston each May.
Presently Professor Rantoul is at a one month residency at the Baer Art Center in Hofsos, Iceland.
In September Rantoul will teach a Photography Workshop in the wheat field country of eastern Washington known as "The Palouse" with fellow photographer Michael Hintlian and next May, in 2014, he will teach a new course at Penland School of Crafts in North Carolina called "Word/Image" with author Christopher Benfey (https://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/facultyprofiles/christopher_benfey)