(SHIFTING) POINTS OF PRIDE

by MICHAEL PERKINS

IT’S HELPFUL, OCCASIONALLY, TO CAST MY MIND BACK SOME FOURTEEN YEARS to the very first days of this blog. The initial motivation for starting The Normal Eye was to at least try to create a photograph platform different from those I was finding online at the time. It seemed that the dominant energy of most articles in those days involved product reviews and technical how-to’s, which I wanted to avoid, both because I felt that that “market”was already being saturated, and because I felt under-qualified to preach or pronounce on much of it. By way of contrast, trying to chronicle my own challenges and growth as a photographer felt easy and at least honest, and the idea of using TNE to emphasize motivations rather than mechanics felt like my most authentic path.

Since then, I’ve been gratified to also make connection with other shooters’ personal quests and alternate truths. They’ve kept me curious, grounded and humbled. Reluctant to act as little more than a student, I’ve inherited hundreds of teachers. It’s been a great arrangement.

This all came slamming back into my mind a few days ago, when I stumbled on this self-portrait from 2012, the year we launched The Normal Eye. After dealing with the initial shock of how much more hair I once had, as well as how much less I apparently weighed in those days, I was grateful that I had framed the shot wide enough to preserve at least a sample of my first “photo wall”, which consisted…what else?…of the work that I was proudest of at the time. In noting that not one of these images hangs on a wall where I currently live, I was reminded of just how and where (and why) I had made all of them. They were exercises in technique as well as hardware, making it easy to peg such-and-such a picture as having been taken “three cameras ago” or “before I really learned to do whatever I was going for there”.

The shots shown here, then, are a chronicle, a diary, reflecting my first extended work with prime lenses, montages, macro work, HDR processing, and a deliberate move away from flash and toward available light, but they are also a timeline, reflective of what I held to be important at the time, thoughts that made their way directly into TNE posts. In the most perfect way possible, my journey was the blog and the blog was my journey: the two streams of inquiry flowed back and forth into each other. I still believe that there are other voices far more qualified than my own to discuss hardware and tech, but I remain confident that I can still trust my instincts as a photographer, and that I can convey them into words that might at least encourage, if not teach. And for that, I am grateful.