MY FAVORITE DESTINATION

By MICHAEL PERKINS

AS ALREADY STATED IN EARLIER EPISTLES from this little gazette, 2024 was, in every sense, The Year Of The Great Uprooting. In reality, we only moved one state over, from Arizona to California, but in a broader sense, we changed nearly every aspect of our daily lives. After twenty-five years in the Phoenix desert, we changed our entire life context by plunking down just ten minutes from the Pacific Ocean in the coastal town of Ventura. For a photographer, it was like being thrown into the middle of a three-ring circus of fresh visual stimuli; the best possible reset of the senses. It was if I had never seen mountains, or the sea, or farm fields before; I was living like a native but shooting with all the spastic zeal of a vacationer.

Still, with all that fresh fodder of making pictures, I find, on the last day of 2024, that my only possible choice for Most Important Photo Of The Year must, must, must be the candid of my wife Marian that you see here. In many ways, it’s the very definition of ordinary, in that I have shot hundreds of such images of her over our nearly twenty-five years together. However, the feeling that shot through as I happened upon her scrolling her phone in our new apartment, was the same one I get every time I feel compelled to grab a camera….an urgency, based on the belief that this moment must be saved.

Why not a shot of the beach or the hills ’round our new home for the “most important” of ’24? Because Marian is the real reason we landed here. It was her tenacity, her belief, her intense focus that kept me on task and fixed upon the final result during months of preparation; her conviction that, after years of daydreaming, we could actually make the leap to a new life. I am certainly a dreamer, at least when it comes to creative things, but I am something of a layabout, even a bit of a dimwit, when it comes to making practical arrangements. And so the look you see here, the slow-burning, sexy, amazing look I’ve enjoyed for decades, a perfect blend between serene beauty and keen awareness, jumped into my brain in the moment, jumping likewise into a very deep recess in my soul, reminding me why I decided, so long ago, that I had to have this woman in my life. As my life. And so, even though many scenic landscapes and local wonders from our new surroundings are sure to follow, this is the picture that defines the year, and so much more, for me. My favorite destination.