SUNSET ON MY SHOULDER

By MICHAEL PERKINS

SOMETIMES IN PHOTOGRAPHY, AS IN ANY OTHER ART FORM, the only way to break through to new creative ground is to run in the opposite direction from your inherited viewpoint. We’ve spoken in these pages about the problem of finding anything fresh in a subject that’s been “seen to death”, such as a familiar landmark that nearly everyone has snapped in the standard “post card” view. This is why it’s really tough to show anything new about an Eiffel Tower or an Empire State Building. To honor such subjects in a unique or personal way, you really have to tear them to shreds, reassembling the pieces into some totally new configuration. Replicating what everyone else has done usually fails as an homage and just becomes a replication.

This need to destroy (in order to create) extends to conditions as well as objects, things that might include, for example, an ocean sunset. Face it: we’ve all had our take on that kind of image, and sadly found that, while nailing the technical execution of it is not that tricky, finding any new thing to say with such a shot is truly daunting. Beginning 2024 as a new resident of coastal southern California, I was tempted, a few weeks ago, to do my “official” version of an amber, dusky sundown scene along the coastline near Ventura. The results were not bad, but they were also undistinguished, like asking thirty actors in a row to recite the soliloquy from Hamlet, most of them meriting an “A” for execution, but a “D” for originality.

In the case of my own dusky dilemma, it was only when I turned my camera in the opposite direction, i.e., away from the setting sun, that I found something halfway interesting to play with. As the light faded beneath the horizon to the north, the sun began to tattoo a golden glow onto the metal plate mounted on the side of a lifeguard station facing south. It was very much a thing of the moment: three minutes before I shot the frame, the light was only bright: then, for a brief moment, it burned with a fierce intensity. Another three minutes later, the entire structure was muted in shadow. The image you see here, then, is much more about the delicacy of capturing a fleeting moment than a standard static sunset shot, a picture of things that can easily be lost, disappeared. In other words, what a photograph is for.

The standard ways of seeing things are our photographic comfort zones. We make pictures of what, from our sense memory, we think a thing ought to look like, since it’s much harder to see things and places as if we have never seen them before. Familiarity may not necessarily breed contempt, but, in the making of pictures, it very well might breed predicability, which can actually be worse.