GET TOGETHER, YOU TWO

By MICHAEL PERKINS

ONE THING CITIES ABSOLUTELY DO; they force odd friendships and strange neighbors.

I once made a small gift book for a friend based solely on juxtapositions of unlike things. Weird pairings that, in many cases, were urban in origin. It was, in a way, an examination of the very nature of cities; their cross referencing, their hybridizing, their forced homogenization of dissimilar objects and conditions to create visual alliances between disparate things. Things that would likely never be forced alongside each other outside of a city. Things that have nothing to do with each other, except, of course, in a photographic frame, their concision becoming a study in contrast.

In Sesame Street terms, one of these things is not like the other. Or, more pointedly, how did they even cross each other’s paths? And is there some special quality to a frame that takes note of their being ill-matched for each other? And, yes, it is quite, quite, quite possible, easy even, to overthink such things.

But consider: do we want to understand why two seemingly random things are visually striking purely because of their mutual unfitness? Would it explain anything? In photographing them, don’t we risk undoing the magic of their occupying the same real estate if we try to decipher how they got there? The image you see here was taken in one of the busiest districts of Manhattan. But beyond that, I know absolutely nothing of either why this picture appeals to me or what created the conditions for me to see it, other than my randomly taking this turn rather than that turn down a street. How can I caption it? How can I explain it? Moreover, why would I even try?

Photographs are extractions, not unlike the act of unearthing the fossil of an ancient beast. Outside the trained eye of the paleontologist, the object has no context, nothing that anchors it in anything else except its effect on whoever discovers it. Isn’t that miracle enough? Cities and other frames of experience throw unrelated things into relationships with each other. We chronicle those collisions as wonders. Can any additional asterisking make those moments any more special?