BACK TO EDEN

The task I’m trying to achieve, above all, is to make you see.—-D.W. Griffith

By MICHAEL PERKINS

EVERY YEAR OR SO, OVER THE NORMAL EYE’S FOURTEEN-YEAR JOURNEY, I tackle anew the task of explaining the choice of that particular name. That means proposing a kind of working definition for the word “normal”, or at least putting forth the reasoning behind my own use of it within these pages.

For me, to be “normal” is to operate within the first, natural state of something. And when it comes to the making of photographs, that means the first state of the human eye. The “factory setting” for your eye is observation, not merely “seeing”. As a new human being coming into the world, you don’t just believe what you see; you believe in excess of, even in spite of what you see. That which we call “factual” is fluid, colored by experience, and certainly not formed by data alone. Only after we leave childhood are we trained to think that are eyes are only to be used for documentation or recording, for evidentiary work. At that point, we stray from the “normal” state of our eyes, the vision we were equipped with, as a default, when we first came to be.

However, once you pick up a camera, you actually leave the plainly factual behind, since you are already utilizing a machine that, on its best day, can only generate an abstraction of “reality”. By making images with that machine, you are already weighted in favor of interpretation, of seeing past your senses. And that restores your ocular factory setting or default. Your soul, in effect, gets rebooted.

It took me four years to paint like Raphael, but a lifetime to paint like a child.—-Picasso

Pablo had the right dope: we have to unlearn the bad training, foisted upon us by the world, about what’s “important” to look at. We have to re-learn the ability to trust fancy. That is the only path to art. If our eyes were merely designed to make a visual document of the world, we would only have to take a single photography of any object on earth, as only one would be necessary. Instead, we honor sentences that begin with “the way I see it is..” We are moved by photographers with normal eyes. That’s what this venue is, and has always been, about. A return to Eden, if you will. A reassertion of innocence. To believe that what we have to say about the world is, indeed, normal. For us.