INVISIBLE BLIGHT

By MICHAEL PERKINS

CLEAR BACK IN THE LATE 1940’s, ARCHITECT FRANK LLOYD WRIGHT began correspondence with various agencies and even president Harry Truman to protest the construction of an array of massive electrical towers proposed for the open desert directly opposite his seasonal headquarters at Taliesin West in Scottsdale, Arizona. He was furious at the idea of the pristine view out the front door of his architectural academy being polluted with the sight of the metal monsters, and proposed that the power lines connecting them be buried underground. Wrong century for fighting the westward advance of American infrastructure. The towers were built and Wright reversed the entrance to his retreat, architecturally turning his back on the ugly sight.

Skip forward three-fourths of a century later and views all over the world are still blocked and blighted with the hideous snarl of wires and relays from the 1900’s. It is the kind of visual garbage that, as regular citizens and especially as photographers, we have all learned to not see, rather like looking through a windshield that is so coated with spatters and bug guts that our lacerated eyes simply focus through it all. Moving from Wright’s bailiwick in Scottsdale to Ventura, California nearly two years ago, I found myself with a stunning view out my apartment terrace of the Topatopa mountain range which, like many peaks along the central coast of the state, rises up rapidly from the nearby Pacific shoreline, going from warm sands to snow-capped peaks of well over 7,000 feet in height within just a few miles. It is the kind of view that begs to be captured in a camera, one of nature’s photographic freebies.

Except.

Except that, to my amazement, while composing the shot, I was astonished by the degree to which I simply did not notice that any view of mountains would have to be through a maze of wires. More upsetting than the horrible clutter of the scene was realizing that I had simply become accustomed, over far too many years, to just not seeing them at all. I once heard a Nikon ambassador say that one of his students could have been on an ocean liner, hundreds of miles from land, and still manage to get wires into her pictures. Now, I was that person, instead of the champion of intentional vision that I had convinced myself I was. Given the gorgeous sight of snow across the top of the Topatopas the other day, I’m still glad I took the shot, although it now goes, along with many other near misses, into the Good Idea, But file. In my youth, I held put the hope that that file would shrink somewhat as I grew old and wise in my photographic pursuits. But, as it turns out, the mountain of mastery is always there, day after day, and just as dauntingly tall, no matter how many times you loop around the race track. And learning to look for what you’ve taught yourself not to see, the invisible blight, is part of that daily ascent.