WONDER WHAT THEY MEANT BY THAT…..

By MICHAEL PERKINS

PHOTOGRAPHY, BY ITS VERY NATURE, pulls things not only out of their time, imprisoning them in a perpetually frozen state, but also out of their context. Extracted from all the other elements present at the time the shutter snapped, a subject must be judged on its own visual merits. It may, indeed, suggest the other conditions that prevailed when it was in the world; that is, a view of the Empire State implies the unseen remainder of the city skyline in which it exists; however, being captured in a photograph can just as often isolate an object or a person, robbing the eye of what it meant in the flow of regular reality.

Museums operate much like photographs, in that they create exhibits of things that have lost their overall context. We learn what we are looking at through explanatory texts or captions displayed near them, but the complete world the things once inhabited is removed. This forces us, as in a photo, to interpret their visual value to us. Sometimes they become diminished, while in other cases, their force actually increases. In visiting museums, I weigh a lot of factors, from empty spaces to shadow play to composition, but I am predominantly drawn to exhibits because the items in them are no longer merely what they were. My camera can thus contort their reality in a million different ways.

Birds are a prime example. As a birdwatcher, I see living creatures that inhabit an entire ecosystem of activity and place. As a guest in a museum, however, I see them in their corporeal form, perfect, in fact, in every detail, but now just objects to be arranged, lit in a particular way, or even abstracted. They become clay in my fingers, recognizable as birds, certainly, but capable of calling up a host of different associations. I can look at them and imagine majesty, mythical power, menace, or a mixture of all three. It reminds me that pictures are created long before the click, and that no two people can frame up the same subject and get the same result. I know what I mean, but figuring out what you mean, well, that’s the wondrous variance that keeps photography a perpetually unfolding mystery.