WHATEVS AND INEVITABS

By MICHAEL PERKINS

JUST LIKE PARENTS IN SOME FAMILIES, PHOTOGRAPHERS HAVE THEIR FAVORITE CHILDREN, those images that require no effort whatever to love. You have some of them yourself, I’m sure; the shots where everything in the concept came home perfectly, where idea and opportunity and execution locked into place like the final triumphant click of a Rubik’s Cube. And then there are, within your selfsame life portfolio, photography’s problem children , the kids not living up to their potential, “troubled” in some way. Their exposure or composition’s off. They’re rambunctious. Technically or conceptually, they won’t sit up straight and eat their vegetables.

Poor Orphaned Thingy #463, 2023. I don’t know what this is. Why ask?

As with a parent, the expected reaction of a photographer is to praise the kids/photos that got all “A’s” and lament the wayward kids/photos that underachieved. But many photogs I know actually take the opposite approach, embracing the strange, oddball images that make no sense to love, while taking the A-list stuff for granted, maybe even stifling a yawn at the sight of them. As I have stated here several times over the years, my “orphan” shots are infinitely more fascinating, and certainly more instructive to me, than my sure-bet pictures. It’s not that I don’t cheer when I get things right; it’s more like I recognize a truer, if more raw energy at work, one I realize from my first days with a camera, in the shots that I can’t explain. With some of my “whatev” images, I can’t even convey to someone else either what I was going for or why I like the result. The picture just had to be done, and just is. In that way, it’s not only a “whatev”, it’s an “inevitab”.

I fervently believe that influential photographers, even as they assemble monographs of their best work, should also anthologize their weirdest. Stuff with no commercial potential or market. Shots that cannot even be captioned, since their origin exists only within some dark little basement of the shooter’s mind. It’s important that we celebrate the raw ideas that come into our head, since they have the same basic DNA as our keepers, and will no doubt someday be components in pictures that we may eventually count among our favorite children.