USER-FRIENDLY

By MICHAEL PERKINS

THE WORLD’S MOST TITANIC ATTRACTIONS, either natural or man-made, are almost always depicted from a distance, adorning postcards, brochures or posters from some ideal perch that allows the camera to take in the entire spectacle of The Very Special Thing within a single frame. That’s the way a tourist sees things like the Eiffel Tower, the Statue of Liberty, or the Grand Canyon; the way they appear in the promotional photograph, the souvenir. For those locals who pass by or through those places daily at street level, however, the view is often very different, in that the part (the thing that I use) varies significantly from the whole (the thing the visitors visit). And that, in turn, provides the best way to see something ultra-familiar in a whole new way.

Example: seen as merely a single feature in a vast panorama that includes both the Brooklyn and Manhattan sides of the East River, the George Washington Bridge looks like a single, continuous flow of metal and macadam, when, in fact, it is a gigantic jigsaw puzzle of millions of interdependent parts…rivets, supports, struts, platforms, staircases, arches…a colossal collaboration of assemblies and sub-assembles. And, in photographic terms, forcing the eye to take in just a subsection of it, as seen here, forces the mind to take the familiar in as a totally unfamiliar thing, allowing for photographs that render an accepted form in a novel manner. It is, in effect, the anti-postcard view…a re-engagement of the senses with something long thought to be complete known.

Cities that attract tourists contain certain visual cues for the visiting photographer, or the urge to capture the super-familiar, to get “the” shot of certain locales. It’s almost as if snapping the expected photo of the Very Special Thing ticks off a box on a list of assignments. But homework and creativity don’t work well together. Struggling to find one’s one version of the super-familiar promotes growth, and, for the viewer, actually broadens our comprehension of that thing. “Nothing new under the sun”, goes the saying, but no one who calls him/herself a photographer can ever accept that proposition. Turn the corner, flip the angle, change the outcome.