SOME OF’s

By MICHAEL PERKINS

PHOTOGRAPHERS, BEING MORE OR LESS AS HUMAN as the next guy, are given, at this time of year (December), to compiling “years in review” or “best of” lists, in an effort to encapsulate the previous twelve months and, who knows, make some sense of it all. Such rosters are the go-to crutch of editors around the globe, who lazily assign their worker bees the task of ranking the top rutabaga recipes, the greatest moments in sports, and, inevitably, their own or someone else’s top images.

I find myself at some disadvantage in trying to evaluate my own work, and so I steer away from “best of’s” and stick with “some of’s” instead. I don’t mind compiling galleries that illustrate what I lived through in a year’s time, but I shy away from assigning any absolute value to any of them. I usually take notice, for example, of the tabs that you see at the top of this page, which click to small photo essays on given themes, and I consider refreshing them from time to time, as I have just finished doing with the current choices you see up top. The photographs in these new tabs, Going Coastal, City, Sweet City ’24, and Westward On A Wing, are not intended to stand as my finest work, but merely a chronicle of what larger adventures shaped me between January and December 2024.

Just A Walk At Twilight, Ventura, California, 2024

The biggest change in my life, for example, was deciding to move to California after twenty-five years in Arizona. That has resulted in what I call oceanic immersion, or a glut of images captured near the Pacific Ocean. Going Coastal, then, contains no great artistic breakthroughs; it’s just that the subject matter, especially for a noob, has me, for the time being, under its spell. City, Sweet City ’24 celebrates my return to New York after an absence of over five years, a long stretch in my experience, and Westward On A Wing celebrates my current stage of development as a bird photographer, which also rounds out to about the last five years. Think of the tabs as diary entires, minus the mooning over that cute new girl at school or pressed prom flowers.

As I said at the top, I find myself quite inadequate to the task to determining what my “best” images are. I can really only attest to what has been engaging or fulfilling for me. That’s why it’s a hobby. And, as with all hobbies, I can never really be “done”, which suits me fine. I prefer a life that’s a process instead of a product, a work in progress, a snap away from either success or failure. It’s fun balancing on that edge.