POINTING THE CAMERA SKYWARD

By MICHAEL PERKINS

MY TENDENCY, IN PHOTOGRAPHING THE HUMAN CONDITION, is to try, if I can, to mine hope from the full range of human experience. It’s my way of manifesting the belief that there is, after nearly everything, a way forward. A path for emerging from the ashes into the sunlight. Making lemonade, if you will. That means that I normally resist making pictures that display unalloyed sadness or despair. I can’t account for why I try to see the world in that way. It’s just in my wiring.

As I write this, the 25th anniversary of the 9/11 tragedy is being marked, with somber, heartbreaking images being wed to the spoken memories of one of the world’s most horrific acts of mass murder. In reviewing images I made in the first years that followed that horror, I realize that, had I wanted to, I was in New York frequently enough (my wife was born and raised there, and we maintain many ties) that I could have made some kind of photographic pilgrimage to Ground Zero to record my own impressions of the wreckage. But I didn’t. The first time I shot anything connected with 9/11 came later, with the opening of the memorial pools that had been built atop the Twin Towers’ original foundations. The first tribute. The first physical roster of the names of the lost. It was still a tremendously sad sight, even as the steel skeleton of the new World Trade Center One rose next door. But it was a symbol of resurrection. Of what The Morning After would look like.

9/11 + 10: The Memorial pools open as cranes begin the work of rebuilding the World Trade Center, Lower Manhattan, 2011.

As Bruce Springsteen sang, “Come On Up For The Rising’, and we did. We transformed a gravesite into a tribute to survival, first with the pools, then with the Oculus, the complex that re-established the PATH to its rightful role as the transit terminal for Lower Manhattan, then as the 9/11 Memorial/Museum, and finally as a new garden of towers not designed to erase memory but to, in a very special way, sanctify it. My pictures could be increasingly about those deliberate acts of resiliency, those defiant, line-in-the-sand, very New York ways of saying to Cruel Fate, is that all you got? If you want to take us down, you’ll have to come bigger than that….

As a human, I feel the same pangs of horror, sorrow and loss as everyone else walking the planet. But once I pick up a camera, I feel charged with something very different from a mere manifestation of anguish. It’s not an attempt to whitewash or deny the sadness. It’s a recognition that the only way out of the dark is to walk toward the light. Or as Ginger Rogers sang so eloquently,

Nothing’s impossible, I have found / for when my chin is on the ground/ I pick myself up/ dust myself off/ start all over again