Overlooking Downtown Ventura, California, August 6, 2023

By MICHAEL PERKINS

MOST YEAR-END PHOTO COMPILATIONS TEND TO BE boasting boards, a parade of the pictures that show off technical mastery, a collection of “Oh, Wow” shots that act as a kind of resume builder for the makers. Moreover, many such lists are specifically pitched as contests, pitting one person’s skill or eye against all comers. These reviews are fun, but, as year-end reflection sets in, I am tempted to sum up the outgoing year in terms of the pictures in which I was keenly and emotionally invested, rather than those where I “nailed it”, leading me to compile a list of “most ofs” rather than “best ofs”.

Overlooking downtown Ventura, California, August 6, 2023

The shot seen here is not the kind of image that’s instinctively in my wheelhouse, in that landscape work is not where I feel my strongest muse. I do it, and occasionally do it competently, but such pix are never the photographs that I feel say anything profound about me, or the things I care most deeply about. And yet, for 2023, I feel that this image has become more important than what it seems to be, i.e., a bird’s-eye view of a small coastal town in California, because, with any luck, it’s where I’ll be moving soon.

That very fact elevates the picture, at least for me, to more than a nice scene. It now represents an aspiration, an ideal, and the first serious attempt I’ve made to re-boot my daily life in over twenty-five years. Of course, this is a very internal conversation I’m having with myself: to anyone discovering the picture without the backstory, it’s merely a pleasant little photo of a pleasant little town. That is to say that I didn’t say anything universally “wise” in making the shot. In fact, I’d be willing to stipulate that the other hundred or so daily visitors to this overlook on that particular day came away with almost the exact same shot, give or take a few factors. And yet, since photography is, for me, a journey, documenting where I have decided to let that journey take me is important. In the eyes of nearly everyone else, this picture will never rise above the level of “okay”, but, looking back at the whole of 2023 and how it shaped me (and my work), it lays down a marker as a “most of”. And with what’s ahead of me in ’24, I need all the North Stars I can get.

By MICHAEL PERKINS

Lord, what fools these morals be!

William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream

ELLIOTT ERWITT, the world’s most widely published freelance photographer, who passed just days ago at the age of ninety-five, served up, in over a half century of work, many proofs of mankind’s folly, but never with Puck’s snooty disdain. For decades, his work displayed our most unguarded moments, the brief instants when the mask of control slips a bit and reveals the vulnerability within. We laughed at his images because they were true; it was easy to identify with the ironic, or strange, or hilarious behavior in the people he snapped because they were us, in all our sloppy and divine imperfection. His was a great eye, and his work was a great gift.

Born Elio Romano Erwitz in France in 1928, Erwitt emigrated to the U.S. while still a child, and was formally educated in picture-making in Los Angeles before moving to New York in 1948, where he chanced to meet the photographic superstars of the day, including Edward Steichen and Robert Capa. By the time he was drafted into the Army in 1951, where he worked as a photographer’s assistant, he already had several published commissions under his belt, and, upon returning stateside, he became a full-time freelancer, taking assignments from the prominent print magazines of the day, from Life to Look to Colliers and well beyond.

Erwitt’s work became mostly associated with whimsy, eliciting dry chuckles from the candid realities he extracted from his random street work. However, his output was always leavened with more conventional journalism and portraiture, ranging from his moving shot of Jaqueline Kennedy receiving the folded flag from her husband’s coffin to cover images for The Rolling Stones’ Get Your Ya-Yas Out album. One of his most widely circulated pictures, seen above, was a shot of his young wife and his infant daughter staring at each other while a cat looks on disinterestedly. It wasn’t Erwitt-funny, or wry, but it became a permanent part of Edward Steichen’s global curation of images from everyday life, The Family Of Man, which made its debut as both an exhibition and a book in 1955. When I heard of Erwitt’s passing the other day, it was this picture, not his “what fools these mortals be” images, that immediately sprang to mind. It’s eternal, universal, quiet in the way a Mozart adagio is quiet, and true, the kind of legacy any photographer would give his right arm to leave behind: the moment the mask slips, revealing a tender humanity underneath.

By MICHAEL PERKINS

ALL OF THE COLORS OF CHRISTMAS SEEM TO BE THOSE that we have artificially assigned to the season. The brilliant reds, greens and golds that flirt and twinkle around the holidays are not nature’s colors, for, like most of life, the hues of the natural world go into hibernation during the winter. We stage bright banners and gay wrappings in front of what is, basically, a hushed palette, greens muted to browns, reds faded to russet, gold tamed to beige.

The onset of winter is made even harder to bear since it immediately follows the most extravagant explosion of color in the entire calendar. Sprays of florescent tones are bittersweet, even in their glory, as they are the explosion that foretells death for the very things that give the season its splendor. Because of this, at least at a photographer, I am always reluctant to let autumn go. It’s like one last embrace from your sweetheart before you are shuttled off to war.

And so, before snow drops its eerie mantle of silence upon yet another year, a hat tip to the great Robert Frost, as his pen and my camera lift one more glass to the brightness….

Nature’s first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf’s a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf.
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay.

By MICHAEL PERKINS

AMERICA HAS NO MONOPOLY on the stark contrast between the haves and have-nots, but we certainly stage that ongoing drama in our own uniquely dramatic fashion. The worlds of comfort and privation in America are often separated by physical walls of membership and exclusion, but the eye of the photographer can often see the two realms parked uneasily side-by-side. Nowhere is this more demonstrable than in our major cities, where one man’s the sky’s the limit life is another’s pretty much everything’s a limit existence. And one of the cities where this existential play is staged to greatest effect is Los Angeles.

Hollywood, specifically, is a Petri dish for the collision between aspiration and desperation, being the world’s foremost fantasy factory. As long as nightmares are the reverse side of the dream coin, the yin and yang of want it and need it will be displayed in Tinseltown, and, to a lesser degree, across all of L.A. The image seen here advertises the up and down sides of daily life, or. if you like, the Scrooges versus the Cratchits. One camps has it and wants to keep it. The other peers over the golden fence and wonders what it’s like to walk in the sun.

Around the world, the chasm between privilege and privation fuels discontent, envy, revolution. It also sparks art, adventurism, enterprise, exploration. And always, in Hollywood and beyond, the symbolism, the visual way of keeping score, the belief that, with a little extra hustle, any Cratchit can put on the golden raiment of a Scrooge. Maybe that’s the pull-push that’s needed to make a society. Whichever way the contest shakes out, there are stories to tell, and pictures to help sell those narratives.

By MICHAEL PERKINS

AS WE ADVANCE IN AGE, OUR LIFELONG HABIT OF PHOTOGRAPHING EACH OTHER takes on a kind of mildly desperate urgency. Suddenly we realize that everything we see might be the last of something: the last birthday with Grandma: the last Christmas before the children move away: the last time we were all together “like this”. A wasted opportunity for a picture becomes a more egregious error. Oh, I missed it. We become acutely attuned to the fleeting nature of things than we ever could have as young people.

2023 mark my first holiday season without my mother. She lasted nearly ninety-one years, and her marriage to my father, who remains, marks its seventy-third anniversary as of this Thanksgiving Day. The image shown here, taken in 2017, is not the final picture I have of them together, but, over time, it has become my favorite. Over the space of two thirds of a century, literally thousands of pictures have been made of the two of them, almost all of them forward-facing, every one of them radiating the love and joy that made their lives a perennial miracle. But this one, with their backs turned to me, can make me cry as well as smile. And I cherish both reactions.

The composition is a pure accident, absolutely a thing of the moment. For years, they maintained the tiny fish pond just outside the back window of their dining area, struggling to keep it clean and safe from the elements as well as the predations of the occasional greedy heron. This meant that the simple act, especially in the winter months, of their looking out to see how “the babies” were doing, was a regular part of their daily routine. And so this is a snapshot of something very ordinary.

Or at least it began that way.

Now, it’s something deeper. Now, it’s the two of them, the Team Supreme, the Two Against The World, side-by-side, looking outward, looking, as one, for the Next Big Dream. I can’t see their faces, but I can clearly visualize their souls. The photograph taketh away and the photograph giveth.

In this cold Ohio November, my father, the last man standing, walks the halls of a home that is now merely a house, looking for his pal, his best girl, and finding only shadows and echoes. Amazingly, he learned enough about hope from her, over a lifetime, to keep going, keep looking for more fish that need caring for. And I go “fishing” for this picture for the solace I seek.

I know they are actually not separated at all, not really.

But, occasionally, I can sure use a reminder.

By MICHAEL PERKINS

THERE IS AN AUTOMATIC AND NATURAL EMOTIONAL CONNECTION between our memories and the images we create as those memories are being generated. The whole “remember that?” appeal of a photograph, after all, is why many of them get made in the first place. Pictures both record and recall in the same instant. We steal time now so we can steal it back later. But there is another heart tug that we feel over a lifetime of making photos, the special one connected to the specific devices we use to do the deed, and what those devices say about who were were at different phases of our lives.

In recently trying to winnow down the Everest of clutter Marian and I will be taking to our next home, I’ve been, as the archeologists say, opening a lot of tombs lately, mountains of accumulated junque which is decidedly less precious than the loot of the Pharaohs. In said tombs I stumbled on a mint-condition Nikon D60, my camera of choice when this blog began more than eleven years ago. It was the brand’s entry-level DSLR at the time, and I was certainly an entry-level shooter with it. Accordingly, once I learned how to do better and desire a more whizbang-y toy, it was shelved and forgotten, along with the memory of just how much dang fun the thing was to shoot with. A full tech check seemed in order before I could decide if it deserved adoption or de-activation, and so, for the first time in almost a decade, I spent a morning pointing it at just about anything.

One more lazy morning with an old friend. In this case, my old Nikon D60, newly emerged from retirement.

It wasn’t quite like taking your ex to dinner years after your breakup, but it definitely created some of the same type sensations. Suddenly, I wasn’t just taking pictures: I was recalling pictures, thousands of them, along with the backstories on how me and the D60 had willed them into existence. I remembered learning specific things for the first time, and recognized how my eye melded with what the camera could and could not deliver…..a lot of, “oh, yeah, it does that” and a warm regard for a kind of picture-making that now seems sweetly innocent. Oh, and, in the bargain, the thing still takes pretty good photos.

The tricky part now becomes where the dingus will wind up. I can’t bear to merely drop it off at a thrift shop or kick it to the curb, and so I now have a whole side project trying to find someone who wants what it does at this precise moment in their lives, a mission which has me annoying friends and relatives alike in search of a grandchild, a buddying hobbyist, somebody to love it like I did. Anything less would dishonor the great times we had together before we sadly concluded, “we need to see other people”. So, sorry, old sweetheart, we won’t be ending the evening back at my apartment, but take care of yourself and keep in touch.

“It was great fun, but it was just one of those things…”

By MICHAEL PERKINS

THE MOST ENDURING PHOTOGRAPHS TRANSCEND TIME, connecting with succeeding generations in ways that both celebrate the eras in which they were originally made and yet keep them unanchored from time somehow, as if what they have to say is completely irrelevant to the date of their actual creation. Even as each succeeding level of photo tech has produced a “look” specific to its place in time,  the photographic art has evolved to the point where we can easily invoke the cues or features of any one photographic age, mixing and matching them in new photographs that also seem free of the constraints of time.

That, to me, is the selling point on apps, and their power as real tools rather than playthings. Our inherited legacy of the meaning of pictorial quality, as well as our sense of how physical images tend to age, is now simulated in endless combinations of color manipulation, textures, and image modification, even in our most casual snaps, meaning that there is no part of our shared photo history that cannot be summoned forth and replicated virtually at will.

Like many, I’ve tried to find a unique combination of app settings that begin to look like a signature style for my manipulated images, rather than just generate novelty effects, like sticking bunny ears on someone’s head. And like many others, I’ve had to radically revise my idea of a “genuine” photo, just as the cel forced me to revise my concept of a “real” camera. That, in turn, has made me looser with both phone pics and the pictures I make with my conventional gear. As to apps, where I’ve finally landed is a crazy quilt of looks that suggest everything from daguerreotypes to hand-colored tones to painterly patches to hyper-focused ultra-detail to textures that suggest either water damage or wear. I don’t know what to label the end result, but I seem, upon rifling through oh-so-many files, to have settled on it as my set point.

Which brings me to today’s launching of my latest gallery, Etchings & Agings, listed in the tabs menu at the top of this page or linkable here. It’s the first full page of phone images that I feel consistently happy about since I started this forum some eleven years ago. I may have come late to the dance with cel images, but they now loom larger in my workflow with every succeeding year. It can sometimes make me feel like I was the last kid in the neighborhood to get a color TV, but then, photography is as much about self-discovery as it is technical mastery. Without one you can’t get the other, and vice versa.

By MICHAEL PERKINS

THE INDUSTRIAL DESIGNER RAYMOND LOEWY, the genius behind some of the most imaginative products of the twentieth century, from the streamlined Greyhound bus to JFK’s version of Air Force One, often remarked how much more beloved an object could become if its outer shell was rendered more appealing. He proved it with everything from cigarette packages to locomotives, improving the public perception of everyday brands just by affecting how they were presented. Some might call such transformations superficial, mere makeovers, but they seriously matter when it comes to the visual impact of the everyday.

Photographing cities of a certain age means photographing the infrastructure that is part of their history, that intersection between how a thing performs and whether that performance is beautiful or ugly. There are good signs that our public places are finally taking Loewy’s lead and paying attention to how infrastructures impact our senses, that is, whether they are a delight, or whether, as H.L. Mencken put it, they “lacerate the eye.” For an example, consider San Francisco, a town of many rebirths and resurrections. The present day version of the place is often built upon the scar tissue of one or other of its prior eras. Things burn down. Thing crumble in quakes. Thing fall to the changing priorities and passions.

Even making pictures in a location as lovely as the Bay City can mean being force to focus through something hideous, like the mad tangle of electrical and cable car lines blocking the grandeur of the venerable building seen here. Above-ground telephone wires are vanishing from many places, and being designed out of the visual layout of newer towns, as are other remnants of bygone periods in American growth, but much remains to be done, a kind of cultural tattoo removal that shows we can, indeed, get out of our own way, that the beautiful signature of one kind of energy is not cancelled by the bad thinking of another kind.

In the meantime, the transition itself is photo-worthy, even important. Like Loewy often remarked, “good design keeps the user happy, the manufacturer in the black, and the aesthete unoffended”. In the interim, pictures can help us mark both our progress and our regressions, and both kinds of images serve to make us knowable to ourselves.

BY MICHAEL PERKINS

PHOTOGRAPHS NOT ONLY RECORD HISTORY: they also function as history itself, used both in the  context of their first creation, and later as illustrations for purposes beyond their original context. We cannot look at breadline images from the Great Depression without seeing all want or hunger in all ages: we can’t help but see the faces of our own dead in Matthew Brady’s jarring scenes from the American Civil War. Photos are given one identity by their makers, and then are asked to play other roles as they move forward in time. 

As one example, lately, I have seen increased use of this image from Buster Keaton’s legendary silent feature The General in articles about dysfunction in both nations and governments, as a fairly on-the-nose example of a “train wreck”, or a situation gone horribly wrong. Ironically, the picture began as proof that one of the most challenging productions of the period had gone amazingly right. 

Forever a depiction of “best laid plans”: the spectacular crash from Buster Keaton’s The General (1926)

The film tells the story of an engineer whose devotion to his beloved locomotive, dubbed “The General”, and his crucial role in conveying supplies and troops for the Confederacy. After many an adventure both above and below North/South battle lines, the train meets its doom attempting to cross a trestle that has been set ablaze, the whole works collapsing into the river below. 

Shooting the overall film in Oregon, a rarity in the days when most movies were shot almost exclusively on studio “back lots”, Keaton selected a crash location near a town named Cottage Grove, which declared a holiday on the morning of the big scene so all the locals (nearly 4,000 of them) could see the one-take spectacle, cheering on their own state National Guard, who crossed the river below the trestle costumed as federal and confederate troops. Making sure that the actual, full-size “Texas” locomotive would make it nearly across the bridge before its collapse was one of the things that made the sequence, at a cost of $42,000 in 1926 money, the single most expensive shot of the entire silent era. Keaton captured the scene with six cameras as extra insurance, and the crash entered popular history even as the film, although later considered a classic, initially failed at the box office.

There are many photographs whose lives far outlast the original periods in which they were created, whether they become symbols of celebration, or, in the case of the General, failure and devastation. Either way, what we shoot today could well serve other uses in other times, for intentons beyond our wildest speculation. 

LONG BEFORE MOST OF US EVER SCREWED A FILTER ONTO A LENS, we were shooting images that achieved kinda the same result. For as long as there have been windshields on cars (windscreens to you Brits), there have been through-the-windshield pictures, since, as we all know, photos are where you find them, when you can get them. Of course, we stipulate that some things that look amazing to your eye come out substantially less so when shot from inside a car, but that’s a lament for another day. Main point is, our first filtered images are often shot through a layer of smashed bug guts, dust, rain smears and wet leaves. And we have mostly been cool with that.

I have more than enough personal history to persuade me that windshield shots seldom truly deliver, and yet the twelve-year-old inside of me still believes that whatever I point a camera at, that’s what I’ll get (a fantasy seldom borne out by reality), and so I can still be convinced to take the shot anyway, especially in the digital age, in which, once you buy the equipment, you’re basically shooting for free. This temptation is made more urgent by the evanescent nature of auto travel itself, conditions in which waiting even a second too long means a vanished opportunity. But let’s face it, we’re truly up against it, on average. If the curvature of the glass doesn’t louse up your sharpness, or if the flare at one end of the glass doesn’t send a rainbow streak across the other, then you can still eighty-six the entire process through camera shake, or just trying to anticipate the precise moment to snap the shutter on subjects that are constantly in motion. It’s kind of a perfect storm of, well, storms. Despite it all, you do occasionally capture a keeper, hence the above illustration, which is less in the “personal best” category than it is in the “doesn’t totally suck” division. But hey.

And so we soldier on, lured by the sheer what-the-hell nature of shooting largely by instinct, in an arena in which we’re more or less expected to fail. Maybe it’s the last vestige of our amateur status, those days of carefree shooting before we even earned our brown belt. Or, just maybe, it’s an attempt to inject both uncertainty and fun into a pursuit that we typically approach, sadly, as a job rather than a joy.