POWERING THROUGH

By MICHAEL PERKINS

IT’S A FACE THAT’S BALANCED ON A KNIFE’S EDGE, teetering between courage and despair, desperation and aspiration. And it’s a face that we, as photographers have not only seen before, but have, in a very real way, inhabited before.

The face of someone struggling to power through.

It was that utter familiarity, that universality that, for me, visually distinguished the face you see here to me, amidst a crowd of dozens of young taekwando students, all gathered for various exercises that would determine their individual readiness to advance in rank. I was actually there to photograph my wife’s grandson, but this young woman drew my attention again and again throughout the evening. At first, her face seemed merely stoic, noncommittal, maybe even blasé or bored. In fact, as I was to learn, it was a disguise of sorts, a brave mask concealing an increasingly keen state of anguish.

Thwarted not once but nearly eight times in trying to shatter a board, her movements had become slower and more unsure, as the physical toll of each attempt visibly compounded itself. I had taken random shots of almost every crack she took at the board, and she had maintained most of her protective mask for nearly all of them, but, In the frame you see here, she was clearly in a horrible space between embarrassment, agony and anger. This particular shot does not show the small glistening of tears visible in the images that follow it in sequence, and yet, in a very real way, her every feature is crying. Crying because she is uncertain if she will be able to please her instructor, her family, herself. Crying because, for this instant, she is trapped, truly trapped inside an uncertain moment that must seem to last an eternity. It is the face of all of us, at one time or another. There’s fear in it, but also resolve.

Minutes after this was taken, she did finally succeed, then slinked off into the outside hall to spend the rest of the class recovering near her family. It wasn’t a triumph; it wasn’t a failure. It was something else entirely, this powering through. I stopped as Marian and I and her grandsons prepared to leave and told her I thought she was very brave. She uttered her thanks, but her face had once again become a cipher. I hope she heard me. She had indeed managed to avoid shattering her foot, but she could not know that she had, incidentally, broken my heart.