OF TWO (OR MORE) MINDS

By MICHAEL PERKINS

I’VE OFTEN WONDERED WHY PABLO PICASSO DIDN’T TRY HIS HAND AT DIRECTING MOVIES, perhaps some time after he decided that painting one part or aspect of a scene at a time was maddeningly inadequate. Y’know, right about the time he started painting women’s faces from two, three, or a half dozen angles at once. When perspective in a single plane was too…confining, when reality seemed more choked and imprisoned within the frame than composed in it. Of course, some artists of his era did, in fact, put down the brush and pick up the motion picture camera (think Man Ray or Jean Cocteau), seeking liberation from the box. Different strokes, as they say in the painting biz.

As a green lad, I had a period of about ten years when I laid down the still camera and shot movie film (not “video”) in search of a more fluid visual language. I eventually came back to the fold, and, indeed, now find it odd to shoot video at all, with notable exceptions. However, some “still” techniques also continue to feel inadequate to my needs. Self-portraits, for example, are often a source of frustration to me. And I do mean “to me”. After all, If someone else tries to capture “me”, I can at least overlook their failure because they really don’t understand their subject. However, when I fail to render “me” in a satisfactory way, where do I lay the blame?

As time goes by, I become more and more convinced that none of us has a representative “look”, one universal template from which we can stamp out consistently recognizable versions of ourselves. We always stray from even our most skilled definitions of who we are, and maybe that’s the beauty of trying to capture ourselves in a camera. It’s the task that can never be completed that’s most tantalizing. It’s the melody we haven’t yet learned to sing that is our siren song, the one thing that keeps renewing our love affair with, our need for art. We can’t lick the problem merely by going full-on Picasso and trying to shove all versions of ourselves into a single shot. Our identity can only be revealed one leaf of the artichoke, or one leaf of the camera shutter, at a time.