COMFORT

By MICHAEL PERKINS

Home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in.—Robert Frost 

PHOTOGRAPHY IS ABOUT BOTH SUBSTANCE AND SYMBOLS, about showing things in their most minute detail, and, alternatively, also about suggesting volumes with simple arrangements of light and shadow. I began my professional life as a writer struggling to fully explain the world, documenting everything from mountains to grains of sand with meticulous accuracy. It was exhausting, and I imagine that it exhausted whatever readers I had at the time as well. Over the decades, I became comfortable with talking less and saying more, especially when it came to the important things like Love, Truth, Knowledge, even the creative act itself. That evolution had the principal effect of streamlining my writing, but it also simplified my approach to photography. I don’t always express the important ideas of life in the simplest terms, but the effort is there.

When it comes to a concept like “home”, I really try to take all the thicker poetic, philosophic and emotional implications of the term and reduce it to the simplest visual symbols I can muster. Buildings instead of the people within them. Stark compositions of color and shade, with an emphasis on under-exposure whenever possible. A muting of the decorative clutter that complicate the impact of a home, with a focus on doors, windows, paths. Strong rectangles and triangles. Lighting that hints at things instead of spelling them out.

As I say, I still waver from a simplicity that, by now, should be an article of faith. Sometimes I use the camera to blurt out a paragraph when a half-sentence will do. In this image, which is not of my own house but a casita I was renting on vacation, I am trying to convey the idea of what the psychologist Christopher Lasch called a haven in a heartless world, or Frost’s concept of a place where “they have to take you in.” The interlocking rectangles and squares, the warm red of the door flanked by the yellowish porch light, the amber tones through the window, and the simple straw welcome mat all combined to form a kind of comfort food for my eye, and I made the picture very quickly. This is not the way to think of “home” merely a way. But it is in finding our own truest ways that we make our truest images. And, more and more, mine run truer when I manage, in small ways, to speak smaller, not bigger.