RAINY DAY, DREAM AWAY

By MICHAEL PERKINS

MANY PHOTOGRAPHERS WHO SURVIVED THE INTERNATIONAL HOUSE ARREST OF COVID ’19 a few years back now benefit from a cool kind of inoculation, in that they may be forever cured of the dreaded “there’s nothing to shoot” ailment, that perennial complaint that no worthy subject matter is at hand. Certainly, boredom on the kind of global level that we experienced during the pandemic led many of us to dramatically revise our idea of “nothing”, as our houses and apartments became, for a time, our entire living environment, converting our immediate surroundings into ad-hoc studios.

Fasten-ation, 2026

During this sustained universal “sick-in”, I myself managed to document, measure, or comment on every angle, wall, and stick of furniture within my own place, and still found myself scrounging for something, not matter how ordinary or abstract, to photograph. I dug out lenses that had lain layered under dust for decades; I explored the settings that only normally appear on page 763 of the user manual; I catalogued my little behind off. The benefit was real, in that I had to seriously re-think what a picture is “about”, and stop thinking that something about my subject had to be “deserving” of a photo. My work became, in a way, more absolute, in that I was making images just to make images, and nothing more. I also had to change my idea of what subjects I felt I had already “done”, discovering, in more than a few cases, that I could easily take another run at them in search of a new element. And sometimes, of course, I was merely burning up days that suddenly had way too many hour in them.

That isolation, and the improvised approach to “work” that resulted, has stuck with me. I still hit days when I fear that it’s all been done, that everything worthwhile has already been snapped. I still have to force myself to produce something, anything on such days, as you can’t always wait for inspiration to come over you like some kind of spell. There once was a popular cartoon of two vultures sitting together on a tree branch, with one turning to the other and saying, “patience, my ass. I’m gonna kill something.” I like to think that, on a rainy, or quarantine, day, I can still go full-on vulture, if the need arises.