ONE CLICK AWAY FROM NIRVANA

By MICHAEL PERKINS

Stop me if you’ve heard this one:

A little girl is taken to a house with many rooms. As she starts to walk through, she notices that, in the absence of any furniture, each and every room is filled from top to bottom with manure. The farther she goes into the house, the happier she seems, until she is actually skipping and giggling with delight. Asked by an adult why she is so happy, she says, “with all of this” (indicating the mounds of manure), “THERE MUST BE A PONY NEARBY!!!”

I like to think that that little girl grew up to be a photographer.

One person’s mess is another person’s opportunity, and in evaluating the world, creative types have to err on the side of hope. The world can be a hideous grab-bag of nonsense and chaos, but all of that disarray can prove merely a thin upper layer, with treasure just beneath it. Photographers, like writers, painters, and sculptors, take the world on its own terms, determined to “find the pony” in all the manure. That abiding faith is what leads shooters to maintain the belief that our next image at least has the potential to be our best. How else to maintain the excitement, the anticipation which creatives need to keep turning the page? If what we see in front of us is, indeed, all there is to see, how can we even get out of bed in the morning? No, better to even have our hope dashed from time to time than to go into battle without that very precious armor. This particular shot may not have “clicked”, but we are still only one click away from Nirvana.

Like anyone, I often fear that “there’s nothing to shoot”, or, more terrifyingly, that I’ve already done my best work, and am on an inevitable decline. Both statements are illusions. I still shoot far too much manure to suit myself, but, if I keep a shovel/camera at the ready, there is always the chance that a pony is nearby.