UNANCHORED

By MICHAEL PERKINS

THE MOST ENDURING PHOTOGRAPHS TRANSCEND TIME, connecting with succeeding generations in ways that both celebrate the eras in which they were originally made and yet keep them unanchored from time somehow, as if what they have to say is completely irrelevant to the date of their actual creation. Even as each succeeding level of photo tech has produced a “look” specific to its place in time,  the photographic art has evolved to the point where we can easily invoke the cues or features of any one photographic age, mixing and matching them in new photographs that also seem free of the constraints of time.

That, to me, is the selling point on apps, and their power as real tools rather than playthings. Our inherited legacy of the meaning of pictorial quality, as well as our sense of how physical images tend to age, is now simulated in endless combinations of color manipulation, textures, and image modification, even in our most casual snaps, meaning that there is no part of our shared photo history that cannot be summoned forth and replicated virtually at will.

Like many, I’ve tried to find a unique combination of app settings that begin to look like a signature style for my manipulated images, rather than just generate novelty effects, like sticking bunny ears on someone’s head. And like many others, I’ve had to radically revise my idea of a “genuine” photo, just as the cel forced me to revise my concept of a “real” camera. That, in turn, has made me looser with both phone pics and the pictures I make with my conventional gear. As to apps, where I’ve finally landed is a crazy quilt of looks that suggest everything from daguerreotypes to hand-colored tones to painterly patches to hyper-focused ultra-detail to textures that suggest either water damage or wear. I don’t know what to label the end result, but I seem, upon rifling through oh-so-many files, to have settled on it as my set point.

Which brings me to today’s launching of my latest gallery, Etchings & Agings, listed in the tabs menu at the top of this page or linkable here. It’s the first full page of phone images that I feel consistently happy about since I started this forum some eleven years ago. I may have come late to the dance with cel images, but they now loom larger in my workflow with every succeeding year. It can sometimes make me feel like I was the last kid in the neighborhood to get a color TV, but then, photography is as much about self-discovery as it is technical mastery. Without one you can’t get the other, and vice versa.