SIZE MATTERS

By MICHAEL PERKINS

TRICK PHOTOGRAPHY seems to travel along two parallel tracks in its relationship between shooter and viewer. If we approach it in a purely creative sense (Track One), we intend to deceive the eye into believing that the alternate realities we’ve created are plausible, essentially acting as magicians who choose a camera over a wand. The audience is there to be fooled, and we are there precisely to fool them.

In Track Two, however, shooter and viewer are in a kind of winking partnership, in that they are in on the joke. We and they both know we have visually concocted a lie, with each party deriving enjoyment at how clever is the deceiver and how hip are the deceived. There’s no attempt to pass off what we’ve created as “real”, and no embarrassment at having purposely left clues for the viewer, who is all too glad to catch us in our fib. It is this second track which seems to underlie the photographing of miniatures.

Many of us have at least dabbled in shooting scaled-down simulations of various scenes mounted atop tables and pretending to pass them off as the real thing. The audience knows that we know we’re faking, and feel satisfaction at not being taken in, even as both they and us tacitly agree that the object was not to actually deceive. Tabletop tableaux have spawned an entire separate school of lens-making and technical disciplines to aid the illusion, but in two simultaneous directions: making miniatures pass for full-size objects and shooting full-sized scenes of actual objects or people and making them seem like scale models.

In the case of the “mountain cottage” seen here, you’re looking at an intricate, fairly large model railroad layout staged in a public park, which I’ve framed so that it’s easy to either believe that you’re looking at, well, a fake, or, if you prefer, have suddenly been transported to a lonely alpine retreat that’s totally not in a botanical garden at all. Photography is always partly about pitting actual reality against constructed reality, sometimes within the same image, and so, in the service of a good joke, it’s not unusual that you would embrace both the roles of charlatan and sucker. And be happy either way.