ONE SURVIVOR AT A TIME

By MICHAEL PERKINS

WE CONTINUE TO SELECTIVELY MOVE IN AND OUT of isolation in this, the second year of The Great Hibernation, getting used to being around each other again, yet reflexively prepared to break off from each other and return to our respective safe corners. It’s a strange and vague situation in which to find ourselves, and our images, as always, reflect that uncertainty.

Aside from the familiar pictures that have been generated by the media to ”officially” depict our delicate status during the crisis, there are also the personal visions, the random things we see that can be repurposed to show how we’re feeling. These can seem to be very ordinary things at first, but as photographers we find our eye “translating” them into something symbolic of our own inner dialogue.

Sometimes, it can just start with a single car. And an impending rainstorm.

It really is the thing of a moment. In the case of this picture, for example, it can simply mean being stuck in stop-start rush hour traffic moving toward an increasingly angry sky. Within minutes, the wind would begin slinging sheets of water sideways, my wipers struggling to keep up. But in between those two moments, I would feel the urge to capture what I saw as a measure of how vulnerable life has rendered us all, awed and helpless before the force, and whim, of nature.

We make pictures to map all our emotions, for good or ill, and the purer and more direct we reflect those feelings, the more powerful and immediate those images become.