ONCE MORE, WITH FEELING

By MICHAEL PERKINS

THE ESSENCE OF LIVING IN A CONSUMER SOCIETY is being regularly encouraged to discard the past, to believe, as did Henry Ford, that “history is bunk”, that, in the interest of selling more and more goods, any and every thing we might hold dear must, instead, be held in contempt, as tossable, replaceable, impermanent. We have now spent nearly two solid centuries living under that instinct, and, as they say, look where that got us. We are urged to discard the things we once loved so we can love their newer, sexier replacements.

This puts photographers on perpetual alert, since part of our function is to mark transitions, those quick flips between the established and the endangered. Grand, sprawling coverage of the vanishings in our cities, for example, have been created by the likes of Eugene Atget, who documented the decline of old neighborhoods in 19th-century Paris, and his pupil Berenice Abbott, whose Changing New York project recorded the same shift in that city’s five boroughs in the early 20th. Photography is the only visual art that is responsive enough to try to keep pace with the accelerating rapidity of change, and even it falls short, in that things are going away faster than we can memorialize more than a small percentage of them.

It falls to the individual photog to select which transition stories to tell, where to spot both vital and trivial shifts in our love of things, as well as our crazed craving for the ever-new. Epic or incidental, all change is a commentary on our priorities. In the case of the above image, it signaled to me that someone in the ever-shifting mix of retail in Santa Monica’s Third Street Promenade thought that the shell of an old Art Deco building deserved to stand just a while longer, albeit gutted and repurposed throughout. The same building in a different area in a different time might have met a very different fate, but this one will fend off the executioner for a while longer. Consumer societies are hard-wired to chuck out the old in favor of the new, simply because it is new, or at least that’s been the pattern for a long, long time. The recent emphasis on “once more, with feeling”, stressing the repurposing of our material goods, deserves a chance as well, though; and that presents a universe of fresh opportunities for the making of pictures.