RE-ORDERING THE ORDINARY

By MICHAEL PERKINS

IF YOU’VE EVER GONE ON A PHOTO SHOOT WITH A FRIEND and stood side-by-side, framing up the very same subjects, you may have been startled to compare your resulting images later and realize how completely different they are. We’re talking here about shooting the very same monuments, landmarks, buildings as each other, with both of you being somewhat mystified that you didn’t produce near-identical pictures. The sentence “where did you see that?” may even have been uttered by one of you.

This subjective interpretation of things, things which are common to a host of different people is, of course, the best argument for human involvement in photography. The fact that there is no set “solution” to a given pictorial tableau is endlessly amazing, the very soul of creative energy. The corollary to this phenomenon is what I call the “I’m new here” effect, where a photographer coming fresh into a situation that is numbingly familiar to someone who lives it everyday sees something obviously photo-worthy in a scene that the “native” can no longer see at all. We get numb to the familiar, which is why shooters often find that they have to periodically transplant themselves into new places because their own “everyday” renders things invisible to our shooter’s eye.

In recently spending a day at the newly re-imagined Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), a stunningly bold campus of gallery buildings that has upended the conventional museum experience, I wound up, inevitably, at the museum’s gift shoppe. The offerings covered the usual array of books, clothing and bric-a-brac, but, in looking out the side window, I saw something that, while just a part of the daily reality for the shop’s staff, struck me as singular. The sign for the David Geffen gallery, which is suspended from an overhang on the outside roof, is reflected both backwards and backwards-forwards four times as windows of one side of the shoppe bounce reflections to another side and ricochet back and forth. The reflection pattern also multiplied certain triangular arrangements of light and shadow against each other, making the image look as if it were bisected or cut & pasted back and forth in fragmented patterns.

If I were to ask a staffer to look out the window as I was shooting this, chances are that the reply would be something on the order of “yeah, so what?”, simply because, by my being “new here”, certain things that strike me as visually novel are just, to the staffers, well, Tuesday. It’s not that it’s impossible to discover fresh aspects of your most routine environments; the masters do it everyday. There is, however, nothing that feeds the imagination like a clear change of venue. Normalizing your eye means training it to treat every day as your first day, much in the same way we saw everything as life-newbies, as children. Experiencing that refreshment is not just a good thing for photography; it’s everything.

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