MY MAINTENANCE YEAR

By MICHAEL PERKINS

NOT ALL PROGRESS IS MEASURED MERELY IN FORWARD MOTION. The phrase “look how far we’ve come” is regularly used to indicated growth, when, in photography, as in many other ventures, the sentence “look how wide/deep we’ve expanded” may be just as important. Thus, at the close of a year such as the one I’ve just survived, my work with images isn’t best seen as a series of break-throughs or epiphanies as an attempt to refine or improve the existing areas of my knowledge that could use a good buffing-up.

The Skirball Cultural Center’s salute to the American Immigration experience, Los Angeles, 2025.

I came to this conclusion after reviewing the calendar year and finding few, if any, miraculously fresh things in the “done” basket, just more detailed ways of delivering the ideas I’ve already explored over many years. Part of this was my own compromised health, which, though temporary, definitely kept me in Emily Dickinson mode, confined to the house and dreaming of the picture opportunities left untouched just outside my window (Emily was a real whiz with a Rollieflex, as I recall). There were too many days I just couldn’t be “out among ’em”, which led me to work, instead, on a deeper dive into things I could work on without a lot of travel.

This led me to a couple of productive areas, including tackling the unexpectedly steep learning curve for a new lens (it takes a lot of work to make things appear effortless, ha), giving me time to enhance my approach to low-light situations (including new uses for Auto-ISO in my wildlife work), and to renew my continuing love affair with 50mm primes. During the times that I was more completely mobile, I found myself searching for visible measures of patriotism, from small marches to grand museum exhibits (see above). In the current season, it seemed only natural to turn my camera toward one of the most convulsive societal upheavals in my seventy-plus years on the planet, and, when I was more regularly out-of-doors, I made a special effort to capture that tension in-camera. As I said, this was a year of sinking deeper taproots into things I needed to improve rather than boldly going where no one has gone before, and I am trying to tell myself that that, too, is of value. Or so I hope.