90 DEGREES OF ENTREATY

By MICHAEL PERKINS

ALL PHOTOGRAPHERS HAVE A DEFAULT ORIENTATION.

I’m not talking here about political bias or sexual preference. No, this stray thread of thought is all about which way one natively holds a camera for most of their work. I myself instinctively compose for landscape, even when I am actually creating a portrait. This may come from the first camera I owned that shot in anything other than square format, giving me a giddy feeling of liberation at being able to frame an image with surplus information on the left and right.

I realize that in an era now dominated by cell phone photos, I may be increasingly in the minority, especially following the Tik Tok revolution, which is portrait-dominant in a major way. I must confess that many TT videos leave me a bit claustrophobic , as if I am hemmed into a world  in which I can’t “look around” inside the image, but that’s the way the platform performs, and so be it.

But orientation is not merely determined in the moment a shot is taken. On occasion, long after I’ve captured something that I feel I “nailed”, I find that a mere ninety-degree tilt can open up the interpretation of a picture, as seen here. This “wish-prayer” collection (top image), actually a framed piece of art that I saw in a gift shop, originally appealed to me because of the dense jungle of shadows created by the cascading layers of tags as seen in one-sided natural light. However, later on, I considered that perhaps the real story of the picture was the viewer’s access to the individual messages of hope, that maybe the photo’s “truth” was all the board’s accumulated entreaties and one’s ability to more easily read them. Ninety degrees later, the entire impact of the photograph has been altered, changing the emphasis from mere design to a straight narrative. I like the image both ways for very different reasons.

But, then again, it might just be my orientation.