THE PRECIOUSNESS OF VANISHMENT

By MICHAEL PERKINS

IN THE EARLY NINETEENTH CENTURY, PHOTOGRAPHY’S ORIGINAL PROMISE was to offer something that had never existed before in the history of the world; the seeming ability to capture reality, to make the tyrant Time itself subject to our will. In an age in which every force in nature, from electricity to distance, was being harnessed to the use of science, this prospect seemed logical. We could now, with this device, preserve our lives as surely as we might imprison an inject in a jar, the better to study at our leisure.

Of course, the truth turned out to be a bit more nuanced.

Instead of imprisoning all of time, we were merely snatching away pieces of it, affording us not an entire view of life, but selective glimpses. Trickier still, we found that all our images, even those we preserved and curated, were still connected to their original context. And as time robbed them of that context, as events and people passed into the void, the pictures that were plucked from that daily continuum also lost a bit of their meaning. Ironically, the thing that was designed to explain everything could eventually be rendered an unfathomable mystery.

Most of the pictures we make of our most cherished people show them in the ordinary acts of living. In the main, they are not chronicles of big things or important days, but, on reflection, it may be that very ordinariness that makes them all the more special, more singularly personal. Over our life together, I have made thousands of pictures of my wife Marian, most of them random, reactive shots rather than pre-conceived portraits. This is strategic; she doesn’t especially like her picture taken, and actively disdains most of the results by most shooters. If I draw a comment as positive as a “that isn’t too bad”, I feel I have beaten the game, or, more precisely, that I have managed, in small ways, to show her what I see every time I look at her.

One day she and I, the “real” people that provide the context for all these pictures, will be no more, and a special kind of mental captioning that accompanies them will also go. Will the images have enough value to be more than the anonymous curiosities we now explore from photography’s earliest days? Will these faces be precious is some way even as their foundation myths are vanished?