WHO’S THERE?

The Information Desk, 2018

By MICHAEL PERKINS

FOR AN ART DEDICATED TO SHOWING THINGS, photography certainly involves itself with concealment.

It wasn’t always that way.

Its original, nineteenth-century mission, which coincided with the reshaping of the world by the Industrial Revolution, seemed to be all about showing everything…the ancient and modern wonders of the world, vanishing peoples, emerging cities, the geological mapping of the globe. Optical technology was bent upon making lenses more sensitive, more accurate. Likewise, recording media, from glass to metal to celluloid sought the same goal: verisimilitude. Then, as twentieth-century art movements became more introspective and less documentary, photography itself became more interpretive and less like….a camera? Abstraction spread into the snapping of pictures as it had in painting. And, eventually, like painters, shooters learned not only the art of revealing but the art of saying more by saying less. That which was once revealed became creatively hidden or underplayed, with the viewer entering into a kind of contest/game with the photographer. What does this look like to you? 

I call this process additive subtraction, the means by which the storytelling potential of an image is actually enhanced by taking visual information away. This can be done by underexposing, cropping, the manipulation of depth-of-field, you name it. The point is that something is deliberately done in the composition of a picture which keeps us from seeing “everything”, from merely recording the scene. What is left can transform or mutate the original subject…make it tease, haunt, even lie. Interpretative photography is about imposing some part of one’s self onto the image, a nudge that asks the viewer to go on a hunt with us. Who’s there? What is that? Why is that? And, most importantly, who’s to say?

In recent years, I have been working with selective focus as a means of sculpting my storytelling. Setting depth-of-field usually is a front-to-back process, deciding whether sharpness will occur near or away from the lens. Selective focus works a little differently with different objects that are often in the same focal plane exhibiting different degrees of sharpness, forcing the viewer to head over to the precise compositional territory we wish to emphasize. This nudging of the audience’s attention can be done subtly or with the force of a baseball bat, and it takes a great deal of patience to master the lenses (most of them fully manual) that deliver the effect. In crowd shots, I find that a uniformly sharp image might make all faces appear equal, when, in fact, some carry their “messages” better than others. So why not control which faces are important, which stories matter more, and which ones just happened to be in the neighborhood when the picture was snapped? In the image seen here, the women at the center of the shot seemed to be having a conversation, while everyone else around the desk seems involved with solo tasks. Selective focus allowed me to turn the surplus people into props. They’re indistinct because, to me, the story works that way. Seconds later, of course, the human “center” of the image might shift in another direction completely. It’s purely subjective.

Photographs are always assumed to be letting us in on a secret, when, in fact, they may be hiding one (or several) from us….for good or ill, depending on your view. But that’s the thing: it’s your view, your method of talespinning. You set the terms. That’s another way of coming back to the subtitle of this blog….the difference between taking and making a picture.