By MICHAEL PERKINS

IF YOU THINK THAT LIFE IS ABSURD, consider….death.

Not the mere fact of the end of life. No, properly viewed, that final human stage can lead to some fierce contemplation, maybe even a revelation or two. No, it’s our own hilarious method of experiencing or marking death that reveals it for, at least some of us, one final shot at vanity. At mattering. Ranking.

We shop carefully for the precise spot where we or others we love will “spend” eternity, even though none of the surface elements we employ….the rituals, the tributes, and so on, are, themselves, of the eternal world. They’re expressed instead in the physical media that we understand. Mighty monuments. Pondrous headstones. Majestic crypts. It’s our last stab at distinction; my mausoleum is grander than yours. My farewell drew more mourners.

And so on.

I make a lot of photographs of cemeteries when I travel. Not out of some ghoulish need to hang with the dead, but because I find that what we try to do to comfort the living is, by turns, both elegant and idiotic, prosaic and foolish. There is also the endless pictorial variety in graveyards. Many are similar but none are truly alike. And then there is the acidic scar that time etches onto the “eternal” markers we’ve erected, creating mystery about the dead that their inscriptions, washed away by the decay of centuries, cannot answer. Initially, we are just dead; eventually, we are also forgotten.

Images from various boneyards can sometimes anchor them in their surrounding communities. They provide context, even commentary. One age’s sacred ground becomes another generation’s industrial development site. It’s as if, by trying to erect permanent tributes to our mortality, we actually underscore the futility of that very task. But the attempt goes on, and the pictures that come serve as a kind of barometer of how we see ourselves, and what we think we’ve amounted to.

By MICHAEL PERKINS

And if you don’t know where you’re goin’, any road’ll take you there—-George Harrison

THE PERSON WHO COINED THE PHRASE, “there’s more than one way to skin a cat” may not have been a photographer, but he/she certainly summed up a key truth about picture-making. Ever since we first started freezing images in boxes, we’ve been trying to craft shortcuts to the creation of our favorite effects, generally adopting the idea that results are about just that, results, and who really sweats what tool or technique you used to get them? Some of the earliest problems in photography, like engineering media sensitive enough to make immediate exposures, took decades to solve, as did the puzzle of providing supplementary flash without, you know, setting fire to the drapes. But we are now at a stage when the tinkerer’s first version of how to pull off something is followed up by simpler shortcuts in less and less time.

More and more, we initially discover how to do things by fairly laborious means, only to turn around seconds later and see a digital or A.I. shortcut that performs the same magic trick at the flick of a button or swipe of a screen. This convenience, wonderful as it is, is sometimes met with suspicion, as if a thing can’t be worthy or good if it comes too easy. This view, that only shooters who bravely grapple with unwieldy processes are making “real” pictures, is a snotty country-cousin to the belief that only those who shoot all-manual are “true” photographers. Me, I’m fine with painting a big wall with a paint brush, but, if I can do it just as well in half the time with a roller, then, yes, please, hook me up.

Selective “Lensbaby” focus, achieved in post-processing with a quick pinch and swipe via the Hipstamatic phone app.

Take, as an example, the recent love affair many have struck with the manual lenses that allow for selective focus to be achieved in-camera, as marketed wonderfully well by Lensbaby and other optics houses. With such specialized glass, a floating “sweet spot” of sharpness is preselected by the user, placed wherever he/she may desire it, surrounded by a soft haze that serves to call extra attention to the subject matter within the selected focus area…all of it done in-camera. These specialized lenses are fairly costly and tend to be one-trick ponies, in that their optics may not be optimum for all the uses found on standard glass. And then there is the time spent in climbing the lens’ learning curve, since uniform results are far from guaranteed.

Now, contrast that to a single trick among dozens of offered post-processing effects within a single phone app, which, in the case of our illustration, is called Hipstamatic. Selecting “depth of field” among the choices, and applying a little stretch-and-pinch of the fingers, renders the Lensbaby effect immediately, and with even greater flexibility, since, with the ability for endless re-dos of the effect before locking in the final version, there is no standard trial-and-error. Also, since you are basically working on a copy of your original, it remains pristine and ready to be taken in other directions on another day, based on your whim. All for the one-time cost of the app, which, in this case, was zero.

Having once invested in the speciality lenses required to make such a shot, must I regard the app-rendered version “less than”? Certainly not in the quality or effectiveness of the final result, and certainly not when it comes to any yardstick of economy or efficiency. The app does what I ask of all photographic processes; places as few barriers as possible between my vision of an image and my ability to hold the result in my hand. Sometimes, as G.Harrison implies, you want to calmly saunter down the old dirt road. And sometimes you want to take the expressway.

By MICHAEL PERKINS

IT TOOK ME OVER HALF A LIFETIME OF STUDYING WHAT I CONSIDERED THE “GREATS” OF WORLD PHOTOGRAPHY to realize just how biased my own eye was, how it was inclined to see all cultures mostly as my own culture was inclined to see. The first images I loved were basically travelogues, that is, scenes from so-called “foreign” nations, as interpreted almost exclusively by Western photographers. “My” people, looking at “their” worlds, traveling afar and coming back to me with stories whose truth I took at face value.

It has taken me a long time, too long, to seek out the visions of people my cultural prejudices regarded as “the other”, to delight myself in the storytelling of indigenous people reporting and commenting on their own worlds, instead of waiting for outsiders (us) to tell those stories for them. It has led me to amazing work, and, lately, to a remarkable Chinese artist named Fan Ho, a visionary whose career spanned over seventy years, ending in 2016, and standing as a true chronicle on the evolution of China since the close of WWII. He was a street photographer long before such a term existed, developing an instinct for what Westerners called “the decisive moment” that elusive instant when all the narrative powers of an image are in perfect sync.

Born in Shanghai in 1931, Ho began snapping at an early age with a Kodak Brownie box camera, graduating to a Rolleiflex K4A, the camera that would be his career-long tool, when he was just fourteen. Developing his film in the family bathtub, Ho was almost completely self-taught, insisting that equipment and technique both took a back seat to emotion, and that he “didn’t work with any sense of purpose”. “I’ve always believed that any work of art should stem from genuine feelings and understandings”, he told an interviewer in 2014. “As an artist, I was only looking to express myself. I did it to share my feelings with the audience. I need to be touched emotionally to come up with meaningful works.”

By 1949, Ho’s family moved to Hong Kong, then beginning its rocket-sled ride into the fraternity of super cities, and experiencing unique growing pains and turmoil as it did so. Ho’s mastery of contrasting tones and shadows made for some of the most impactful black-and-white photography of the twentieth century, a magical balancing act between revealing and concealing. Beginning in 1956, his entry into exhibitions earned him over 280 international awards for excellence, and by the 1950’s, he segued into his second career in cinema, becoming a director a few years after and producing feature films until around 1980. Re-locating to San Jose, California in retirement, and encouraged by friends to return to still photography, he instead chose to curate his old negatives to gain access to shows in the United States, where many critics discovered the breadth and range of his output. At this writing, the easiest way to see even part of his work is in online image searches, as nearly all of his formally published collections are either out of print or seriously expensive…when they can be found.

I am one of many who wound up being late to the Fan Ho party, but a party’s still a party no matter when you arrive, and I am grateful for the chance to learn still another way to see, regardless of where the lesson originates. After all, the only real chance you have to learn anything is to admit how little you know.

By MICHAEL PERKINS

COMPARED TO THE INTRICATE ASSEMBLY OF THE COVER SHOT FOR THE SGT. PEPPER ALBUM just two years prior, the creation of the cover for 1969’s Abbey Road, the Beatles’ final studio album, was a relative snap (excuse the expression).

Whereas Pepper’s “people we like” montage of life-sized celebrity cut-outs took days of prop arrangement and a true jigsaw process of addition and subtraction, the task for photographer Iain Macmillan on Abbey was relatively simple. Find a suitable location, engage a cop to briefly block traffic, and parade the Fab Four back and forth in what would become the most iconic procession in pop music history. Macmillan, a friend of both John Lennon and Yoko One, arrived at the site with a rough idea of the object of the shoot, as Paul McCartney had already worked up some pencil sketches of how the group wanted to be arranged in the “zebra” crosswalk. Iain needed only to clear the intersection and climb a borrowed ladder to get the correct angle and framing for all four Beatles.

And since I can hear you all asking out there in the blogosphere, Macmillan’s weapon of choice for the assignment was a Hasselblad fronted by a 50mm lens. He shot at f/22 and 1/500th second, given that it was a clear August day with plenty of sunlight to spare. The entire shoot totaled no more than six frames, with McCartney selecting the fifth shot in the sequence, reportedly because it showed the group walking away from the Abbey Road studios, a kind of subtle farewell to the site of their best work over the previous decade. It also came closest, among the frames, to give the impression that they were all in the same general step rhythm (make of that what you will). What the final choice shows most clearly, though, given the global familiarity of the final product, is the way in which a simple editorial call can take a shot that’s merely one in a generally similar batch of images, and make it not only acceptable but inevitable, as if to say, of course, that’s the only one which would have worked.

In examining the options that might have been in the making of a classic photograph, we see the true value of editorial judgement, of learning how to pluck the classic shot from a clutch of okay alternatives. Assuming that McCartney was, indeed, the final arbiter of which of Macmillan’s photos was to be “the keeper”, one wonders what George or Ringo, accomplished photographers in their own right, might have chosen. But Fate went the way She went. Inside many of our most casual bursts of frames might lurk an “inevitable”, a picture that cries “it could only ever be thus”. Our judgements after the snap are often the equal of everything that went before it. It’s a long and winding road (again, sorry).