UNTIL THE NEXT THING COMES ALONG

By MICHAEL PERKINS

I AM NO STATISTICIAN, but it’s a safe bet that staring at one’s phone may be one of the most universal of human behaviors in this, the year of Oh Lord, 2024. However, as a photographer, and one who seeks the street over every other available canvas, I would bet that the number one human pastime, by a mile, is waiting.

In trying to catch homo sapiens in his most native (candid) state, I find cell phones to be a forbidding barrier between me and the human face. Expressions of any revealing sort seem to simply drain out of our features when we are transfixed on screens, and the heart and soul of street photography is showing people in the act of reacting; thinking, enjoying, interacting, celebrating, dreading, wishing, raging, whatever. And the unavoidable pauses imposed on us while we are waiting are rich with all of that, in a way that “man on a phone” just ain’t.

And there is still so much of this loot to mine; we wait on trains, buses, Ubers, fate, fortune, accident, each other. We must stand in line and on corners and tap our toes impatiently until the light changes, until the moment arrives, until something delivers a shift in the life equation. And in those dead spaces, we spell out spectacular ballets, not only with our faces, but with our bodies, and how they move in relation to other bodies, other fates. And, like the colorful glass shards within a kaleidoscope, every fresh shake of destiny calls up patterns we somehow never saw before.

The activity of making photographs can be like Lucy and Ethel sorting chocolates on a high-speed conveyor belt; there is only a brief instant in which to decide what goes where, whether any of it is worth saving, or whether we should just pop it down our shirt. The shirt shots are forgotten quickly. The stuff that gets sorted correctly teaches us things about ourselves.