THERE WENT ME

“You look angry”, someone said after looking at this recent portrait. Well, yeah…

By MICHAEL PERKINS

PHOTOGRAPHERS ARE A BIT LIKE AUTHORS OF WRITTEN MEMOIRS, in that they have to constantly worry about their trustworthiness as narrators. Armed with a machine that can shape perceptions and even influence history, can we be relied upon to tell the truth (if anyone can agree on what the truth is)? One of the key “tells” of a photographer’s veracity should be his or her ability to showcase themselves in a portrait. But that, in terms of honesty, is actually where most of the mischief occurs.

This seems counterintuitive. How can we not be the ultimate authority on how we look, or how we should be visually captured? Some of it may be how the portrait, and the selfie in turn, has evolved over the centuries. When photography was new, having your portrait “made” was an attempt to make a document of yourself. To record the official version of you. Opportunities to do so were expensive and sparse. Once photography became a mass-appeal hobby, the snapshot made portraits less formal, and, in turn, less important. People went, within a generation, from having one or two pictures made of their faces to having hundreds snapped. In recent years, even more drastic changes in ease and convenience have squared and cubed that number, as we pose for more images of ourselves than we can even put a number to. And, along the line, we have become better and better at hiding more of what we consider the boring or bad parts from the omnipresent camera.

I have been trying for weeks to think about what The Quarantine has collectively done to the human face, and how that can be documented. Some visual impacts, like strap marks on the faces of surgeons or grief carved onto the features of the bereaved, are readily apparent. But how to measure photographically what the crisis has done to our insides? What of those costs are even readable on our faces? Suddenly, a very special opportunity, or obligation, is re-connected to the selfie. Now, in the interest of truth-telling, we must un-learn the clever tricks that allow us to regularly look in the camera and lie, creating false images that say I’m doing fine. My life is great. I don’t need any help…

What you see here is an experiment. It’s not really “posed” in the standard sense, as I shot it as part of a rapid series that allowed me only minimal time to prepare, or, if you will, overthink what my expression “should be”. This is thus a piece of me, in the context of these days, but it’s not the entire story. It’s, if you will, less of a lie, but also less of the complete truth about whoever I am these days. I’m not completely untrustworthy as a narrator, but whole big parts of me are still fighting the process of baring it all. Maybe I can’t get there. Maybe none of us can. But photographers are charged with looking for answers, even if they fail in completely nailing them down.