By MICHAEL PERKINS

I AM NOT THRILLED WITH THIS PHOTOGRAPH.

However, it could have been a whole lot worse, in that it might never have been attempted at all.

We talk about “no day at the beach”, but on the day this was shot, that’s all I really wanted. My mood found me with no camera on my shoulder, a condition so weirdly rare that my wife, in her very New York sense of sarcasm, asked, “whaddya, sick?” Indeed, it’s not often that I go out photographically inert. I had a camera, but it was in a parked car, a quarter of a mile away from where we were walking. Then I spotted Mister Man here.

The cabled-off area you see in the top shot protects recovering sand dunes (they are living things, trust me) at California’s San Buenaventura State Beach from visitors who might otherwise tramp through them en route to the surf, which faces directly opposite. The approved entrances to the sea breach this dune “wall”, and we had walked through one of them from the parking lot just to walk off some tension when Marian’s binoculars picked up, not your typical gull or sandpiper, but a gorgeous peregrine falcon, apparently scanning the coast for a shot at lunch. “Can you get him?” she asked, even though she knew I was bare-handed. My heart sank. My telephoto was all the way back home, and the Nikon Z5 in the car was only fitted with a 28mm, far too wide for a proper portrait of the raptor. However, after a bit of fussing that the ideal was not possible, I opted for the real, walking back to the car to salvage what I could with the wide-angle.

More “crap” than “cropped”, but you can’t blame a gal for trying…

When we had been near the falcon beforehand, he seemed spook-proof, absolutely rooted to the spot. Passersby and beach patrol wagons had both failed to make him take flight, and, sonofagun, upon our return, he was still there, not flinching so much as a feather. I got as close to him as the steep bank of the dunes and the shifting sand would allow, inching within about twenty feet. Of course, in the view of the 28mm, he might just as well have been in the next county, but I took my shot (that is, about thirty of them). Better to have loved and lost than never to have blah blah blah.

The narrative of the shot, which even at a super-sharp f/16, could not be cropped enough for a really detailed portrait, shifted now, to be about the bird as the sole feature of interest in a wide, rolling terrain. And I can live with that. The old photographer’s advice to A.B.S. (always be shooting) sometimes translates to A.B.W.T.B.S, or “always be willing to be shooting”. No, I am not thrilled with this picture. But I am thrilled for the chance to have made the attempt. Any good batter knows that hits are a consequence of a huge-number of at-bats, most of which result in pop-ups and strike-outs. To get to the good stuff, you just gotta keep stepping up and taking a swing.

By MICHAEL PERKINS

I AM VERY NEW TO DAILY LIFE in California. After decades of longing to convert my occasional doses of this marvelous state into the stuff of everyday experience, to go layers beyond mere vacation sensation, Marian and I have actually done it, making a new home in Ventura, a mid-size city along the Pacific coast about fifty miles north of Los Angeles. This means that the ocean is something we don’t just perceive as a getaway or a holiday destination. It’s something we see nearly every single day.

And once you’re a local, especially a photographer local, you see things that go far beyond the gorgeous sunsets and the lapping waves, including several things you wish you could un-see.

This dessicated pelt, a lunch opportunity for shorebirds and scavengers along the Hollywood Beach, was once a young sea lion. Its bones now picked clean down to the very contours of its skull, it is, sadly, also a more frequent sight for those of us walking the area coastline. Hundreds of sea lions have been washed ashore to suffer and die this year along the California coast, poisoned by an invisible scourge happening silently out to sea. A compound called demoic acid, a species of plankton, is in a state of high surge at present. That is to say that chemical changes which typically convert very small amounts of it to a deadly neurotoxin are currently churning it out like crazy. Fish eat the algae that contains it, apparently without harm to themselves, but sea lions eat the contaminated fish, and the result is an epidemic of sea lion death in San Luis Obismo, Santa Barbara, Ventura, and other coastal towns.

The process by which these toxins are produced in bulk is called upwelling, which occurs when the right combination of colder water meets the right amount of nutrients. Upwelling seasons are a part of oceanic life, occurring randomly since the beginning of time. But what’s puzzling to science, and deadly for mammals like the sea lion, is the increased frequency and intensity of such toxic “blooms”, which may very well prove to be yet another sinister side effect of climate change.

California has so much of its life anchored to the seasons and cycles of the sea that such threats are front and center for policy and abatement, meaning that the state is already seeing things the rest of us have not seen, making match-point decisions that will eventually echo across the great middle of the nation. But to know a thing is happening, we first need to see it happening. Cameras are great for vacations. But we are also obligated, now and going forward, to also use them to bear witness, if not to head off destruction for ourselves, then to chronicle, for our wiser children, what fools their forebears once were.

By MICHAEL PERKINS

SOMETIMES IN PHOTOGRAPHY, AS IN ANY OTHER ART FORM, the only way to break through to new creative ground is to run in the opposite direction from your inherited viewpoint. We’ve spoken in these pages about the problem of finding anything fresh in a subject that’s been “seen to death”, such as a familiar landmark that nearly everyone has snapped in the standard “post card” view. This is why it’s really tough to show anything new about an Eiffel Tower or an Empire State Building. To honor such subjects in a unique or personal way, you really have to tear them to shreds, reassembling the pieces into some totally new configuration. Replicating what everyone else has done usually fails as an homage and just becomes a replication.

This need to destroy (in order to create) extends to conditions as well as objects, things that might include, for example, an ocean sunset. Face it: we’ve all had our take on that kind of image, and sadly found that, while nailing the technical execution of it is not that tricky, finding any new thing to say with such a shot is truly daunting. Beginning 2024 as a new resident of coastal southern California, I was tempted, a few weeks ago, to do my “official” version of an amber, dusky sundown scene along the coastline near Ventura. The results were not bad, but they were also undistinguished, like asking thirty actors in a row to recite the soliloquy from Hamlet, most of them meriting an “A” for execution, but a “D” for originality.

In the case of my own dusky dilemma, it was only when I turned my camera in the opposite direction, i.e., away from the setting sun, that I found something halfway interesting to play with. As the light faded beneath the horizon to the north, the sun began to tattoo a golden glow onto the metal plate mounted on the side of a lifeguard station facing south. It was very much a thing of the moment: three minutes before I shot the frame, the light was only bright: then, for a brief moment, it burned with a fierce intensity. Another three minutes later, the entire structure was muted in shadow. The image you see here, then, is much more about the delicacy of capturing a fleeting moment than a standard static sunset shot, a picture of things that can easily be lost, disappeared. In other words, what a photograph is for.

The standard ways of seeing things are our photographic comfort zones. We make pictures of what, from our sense memory, we think a thing ought to look like, since it’s much harder to see things and places as if we have never seen them before. Familiarity may not necessarily breed contempt, but, in the making of pictures, it very well might breed predicability, which can actually be worse.

SPHERE ITSELF

Wet Democracy (2017): The 1964 World’s Fair’s central icon as play space.

By MICHAEL PERKINS

CULTURAL ICONS, which burn very distinct patterns into our memory, can become the single most challenging subjects for photography. As templates for our key experiences, icons seem to insist upon being visualized in very narrow ways–the “official” or post card view, the version every shooter tries to emulate or mimic. By contrast, photography is all about rejecting the standard or the static. There must be, we insist, another way to try and see this thing beyond the obvious.

Upon its debut as the central symbol for the 1964 New York World’s Fair, the stainless steel structure known as the Unisphere was presented as the emblem of the peaceful ideals put forth by the Exhibition’s creators. Under the theme “Peace Through Understanding”, the Uni, 120 feet across and 140 feet in height, was cordoned off from foot traffic and encircled by jetting fountains,which were designed to camouflage the globe’s immense pedestal, creating the illusion that this ideal planet was, in effect, floating in space. Anchoring the Fair site at its center, the Unisphere became the big show’s default souvenir trademark, immortalized in hundreds of licensed products, dozens of press releases and gazillions of candid photographs. The message was clear: To visually “do” the fair, you had to snap the sphere.

After the curtain was rung down on the event and Flushing Meadows-Corona Park began a slow, sad slide toward decay, the Unisphere, coated with grime and buckling under the twin tyrannies of weather and time, nearly became the world’s most famous chunk of scrap metal. By 1995, however, the tide had turned; the globe was protected by the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission, and its rehabilitation was accompanied by a restoration of its encircling fountains, which were put back in service in 2010. The fair park, itself staging a comeback, welcomed back its space-age jewel.

As for photography: over the decades, 99% of the amateur images of the Unisphere have conformed to the photographic norm for icons: a certain aloof distance, a careful respect. Many pictures show the sphere alone, not even framed by the park trees that flank it on all sides, while many others are composed so that not one of the many daily visitors to the park can be seen, robbing this giant of the impact imparted by a true sense of scale.

In shooting Uni myself for the first time, I found it impossible not only to include the people around it, but to marvel at how completely they now possess it. The decorum of the ’64 fair as Prestigious Event now long gone, the sphere has been claimed for the very masses for whom it was built: as recreation site, as family gathering place..and, yes, as the biggest wading pool in New York.

This repurposing, for me, freed the Unisphere from the gilded cage of iconography and allowed me to see it as something completely new, no longer an abstraction of the people’s hopes, but as a real measure of their daily lives. Photographs are about where you go and also where you hope to go. And sometimes the only thing your eye has to phere is sphere itself.

By MICHAEL PERKINS

ALL PHOTOGRAPHERS HAVE A DEFAULT ORIENTATION.

I’m not talking here about political bias or sexual preference. No, this stray thread of thought is all about which way one natively holds a camera for most of their work. I myself instinctively compose for landscape, even when I am actually creating a portrait. This may come from the first camera I owned that shot in anything other than square format, giving me a giddy feeling of liberation at being able to frame an image with surplus information on the left and right.

I realize that in an era now dominated by cell phone photos, I may be increasingly in the minority, especially following the Tik Tok revolution, which is portrait-dominant in a major way. I must confess that many TT videos leave me a bit claustrophobic , as if I am hemmed into a world  in which I can’t “look around” inside the image, but that’s the way the platform performs, and so be it.

But orientation is not merely determined in the moment a shot is taken. On occasion, long after I’ve captured something that I feel I “nailed”, I find that a mere ninety-degree tilt can open up the interpretation of a picture, as seen here. This “wish-prayer” collection (top image), actually a framed piece of art that I saw in a gift shop, originally appealed to me because of the dense jungle of shadows created by the cascading layers of tags as seen in one-sided natural light. However, later on, I considered that perhaps the real story of the picture was the viewer’s access to the individual messages of hope, that maybe the photo’s “truth” was all the board’s accumulated entreaties and one’s ability to more easily read them. Ninety degrees later, the entire impact of the photograph has been altered, changing the emphasis from mere design to a straight narrative. I like the image both ways for very different reasons.

But, then again, it might just be my orientation.

By MICHAEL PERKINS

MANY PHOTOGRAPHERS HAVE LOCALES THAT ACT as muses, triggers for their creative processes. Ansel Adams had Yosemite; for Walker Evans, it might be the streets (and subways) of Manhattan; and, of course, Paris inspired Eugene Atget to tell its story through indelible chronicles of its vanishing streets. As I prepare to leave Arizona after twenty-five years, the scene of most of my photographic crimes remains Phoenix’ amazing Desert Botanical Garden. Created as a nursery for the most unique plant life in the country, it has provided me with the breeding ground for thousands of images taken in every season, in every kind of light, and across the entire range of human emotion. It has, simply, been a laboratory where I go to work on the project of making myself into a better photographer.

I’m still not really “done” with the DBG, but the feeling of leaving something unfinished that I’m experiencing actually cements its place as a legit muse. Even the cacti and trees that I can practically find blindfolded along its paths still reveal new secrets to me, as they have done since I first vacationed in the area in the mid-90’s. From then til now It has been a testing ground for a slew of different film stocks, over six different cameras, countless lenses and a crazy variety of processes and approaches, from HDR to minimalism, analog to digital, soft-focus to low-fi. I’ve shot pictures of quiet contemplation and audacious art installations; I’ve taken casual snaps of awestruck visitors on winter vacations and pensive portraits of native “Zonies” who have made it their personal retreat. Most importantly, the garden has become my go-to playground, the most reliable place for me to stage my pictorial equivalents of an off-Broadway premiere.

The images I have made there, for better or worse, are a reliable road map of every major turn in my development as a photographer over a quarter century. All my light-bulb moments, my moods, my breakthroughs, my barriers. It’s all there amongst the aloes and the ocotillos, the starched plains and the insistent pops of floral color set against the restrained hues of the American desert. Life, death, joy, disaster, and above all, discovery…all of it has happened on these paths. Does that somehow make it the “best” place to take pictures? Well, that’s a very personal thing. Finally, it’s not about whether a particular place is of universal interest or appeal to everyone with a camera. The fact that it acts as a lab for kitchen–testing your concepts is enough, serving as a launch pad for your most perfect, most serious work.

By MICHAEL PERKINS

THE ARMY OF LABORERS, reporters and lookers-on that sift through a millionaire’s lifelong horde of loot  at the finish of Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane share several emotions, among them amazement, curiosity, and. flat-out bewilderment at the sheer acreage of stuff acquired in the name of mere desire. What is this junk? Who would want it, or, more to the point of it, so damned much of it? One of the workers charged with cataloguing it all makes note of yet another Venus de Milo statue found in the obscenely vast field of material debris, while another remarks that $25,000 is “a lot of money to pay for a dame without a head”. In the end, all of Kane’s accumulated wealth amounts to little more than booty, transferred from place to place until it becomes merely a massive mess left behind for others to clean up. And, as film lovers will recall, his most valued possession, buried in mountains of clutter, accidentally goes to the furnace, up the chimney in a curling billow of black smoke.

That same feeling of bewilderment will hit anyone who clears a house before moving out of it, sparking the nagging question, why did I keep this? In some cases, we actually know why, but in many others, the mystery lingers unanswered. And as I look, here, at the books from a life defined by the love of books, I know the story behind many of them. Why I bought them, what I gleaned from them, what made me drag them from house to house over a lifetime. But, then there is the other pile, the “Venuses” that won’t make the jump to the next home. Those aren’t shown here because, frankly, it’s a bit embarrassing to (a) ponder just how bloody many of them there are and (b) to confront the fact that books cling to me like barnacles to a ship.

No one quite understands the process, but it’s safe to say that, as a narrative, my life “story” is always in dire need of an editor. And so, for a photographer, another set of choices emerges, as a home of twenty years is de-constructed, piece by piece, and there is a strong urge to, as with Kane’s minions, catalogue at least the process if not the meaning of it all. To look upon the weird temporary still-lifes that are springing up all over the house and wonder if there are any Rosebud sleds lurking in the depths. Or should it all just go to the furnace?

By MICHAEL PERKINS

FIFTY-TWO YEARS AGO, IN 1972, FRANK SINATRA RELEASED the most experimental album of his career. Watertown, a unified song cycle or “concept album” rather than a random collection of individual tracks, was devoid of the hip glamour of the Rat Pack, running cross-grain to everything the Chairman Of The Board’s fans expected of him. As a consequence, The album sank like a stone. 

Watertown is a study in the isolation and despair inside the Great American Small Town, as told through the eyes of a man whose wife has left him to care for his two small children alone, her dreams unknowable, her grievances uncertain. Several of the songs center on the center of the town, the local railroad depot. The nexus of comings and goings. Hopes. Disappointments. Soft escapes. Quiet desperation.

Recently, my mind travelled back to my student film days, when Watertown was new and I used its opening song as the soundtrack to one of my four-minute Super 8 epics, shot in my mother’s birthplace of Wellston, Ohio, a place which spent much of the 20th century and all of the 21st slowly sliding into oblivion. Years later, the film is long since lost, but, thanks to a critical re-evaluation and revised appreciation of Watertown, the inspiration for it, as well as newer images, survives, as Sinatra intones:

Old Watertown
Nothing much happenin’
Down on Main
‘Cept a little rain
Old Watertown
Everyone knows
The perfect crime;
Killin’ time

And no one’s goin’ anywhere
Livin’s much too easy there
It can never be a lonely place
When there’s the shelter of familiar faces
Who can say
It’s not that way

Old Watertown
So much excitement
To be found
Hangin’ round
There’s someone standing in the rain
Waiting for the morning train
It’s gonna be a lonely place
Without the look of familiar faces
But who can say
It’s not that way 

Sinatra, a singer known for signature albums like Only The Lonely, collections that wrung every last drop of sadness out of the particular kind of heartbreak that is America, really swung for the fences with Watertown, making more of a solid commitment to contemporary material than was typical in much of his later years. Half a century on, many critics have realized what a treasure the doomed project really was. There’s also a lesson in there for photographers, or anyone who ventures into unknown territory. Even when the trip seems to go nowhere, the journey is often worth the taking. 

By MICHAEL PERKINS

I HAVE ALWAYS THOUGHT OF NEW YORK YEARS in the same way we often refer to dog years. Like Fido and Spot and Shep, the greatest city on earth crams a lot of living into every page of every calendar. A year away from Manhattan is enough for what I call The Eternal Facelift to have razed millions of memories and paved them over with shiny new ones. Neighborhoods you admired as Up & Coming on your previous visit are now yesterday’s scenes, with the focus shifting to confer Hot District status on what were, just a breath ago, ruins. New York, where American theatre was birthed, is itself like some eternally running Broadway show that is perpetually in revival. Now appearing in the role of The Apple is… The Apple, Revisited.  Held over. Tickets still available at popular prices…..

As I write this, on Easter Sunday in the Year of Good Lord 2024, it has been nearly five years since I set foot on those streets, an insanely long sensory drought for a gent graced, for nearly two decades, with the chance to visit at least twice per year, sometimes more. Marrying into a family that called a place home that Midwestern, landlocked corncob me always regarded as an unattainable fantasy has gifted me with the privilege to see the place through the eyes of natives rather than from a double-decker tour bus, and that, as Robert Frost said, has made all the difference. Sadly, as it did for the locals, Covid-19 started the new decade off by turning us all into terrified house cats, scrubbing the cooties off our counters after the groceries were delivered by ghosts in hazmat suits, collapsing into cocoons of hoodies and p.j.s, waiting for the resurrection.

Perhaps this Easter Week has made me more conscious of transitions, as has the unfurling question of my immediate future, as Marian and I make preparation to leave our home of more then twenty years for a new perch in California, or about as far away from NYC as you can get without walking into the ocean. It’s sent me flipping through an endless trove of images collected by countless walks uptown, downtown, midtown, from towers, bridges, dark dank subway stations and bright, glistening new steel fingers jutting up into the sky. I don’t mind saying goodbye to my immediate environs in Arizona, but boy howdy how I’d like to spend just a fat weekend in, as the locals call it, The City, just to convince myself that it’s still there, still morphing and mutating, still living to defy the odds and confound the naysayers and hayseed haters. After all the places I’ve lived and visited, my heart tells me that America largely boils down to West and East Coast, with a vast vaporous something occupying the space in between them. I have read a lot of the books within the country’s library, and it’s still the bookends, the left and right bowers, that are most real to me, and to whatever eye I’ve acquired with a camera. It’s a strange truth to arrive at, but there it is. And so, toggling between two shores, am I.

By MICHAEL PERKINS

IT’S BEEN NEARLY TWENTY YEARS since the last time I changed residences, and the process of taking inventory of the trail of quaint trash accumulated over that period is both hilarious and humbling. Hilarious, because I recognize a lot of stuff that I somehow justified bringing along the last time I moved, and humbling because I hadn’t heretofore acquired the discipline required to just consign much of it to the dustbin. It’s not merely a case of asking “what was I thinking?” once and being done with it, but, in the present sorting process, posing that question several dozen times each day.

One way to calm the emotional unease of parting with stuff that you can’t logically justify hanging onto is to make formal photos of the items on their way out. We are physically downsizing our total household load of chazerei by quite a lot on the way to a much smaller joint, a process which makes it easier to make quick keep/trash decisions than if we were relocating to same-size digs. That strikes a lot of purely sentimental things off the list right away, like china my wife has carried from house to house simply because it’s always been in her family (top) or souvenirs of the 1939 New York World’s Fair (below) that I retained in hopes of someday creating a massive showcase display, a project which I now realize only exists between my ears. Some bits are old friends, automatically transferred to each successive house or apartment over decades. Many of them cannot accompany us on this one last adventure.

We will probably recall a lot these passing bits in detail for as long as our minds remain intact. For those that we have partially forgotten, there will be the pictures. For those that we have totally forgotten, there will be more room for other things in the crowded attic between our ears. In any event, there will be far less weird lore for our children to sift through later, wondering, as they go, what the devil this or that thingamajig was used for, or who in hell would want to hang onto it. There again, the pictures may provide a clue. Or not. And so it goes.

By MICHAEL PERKINS

THIS WEEK, AS I PREPARE TO MOVE OUT OF ARIZONA after twenty-five years, one of the things that will be hardest to leave behind will be my eleven years as a mentor and guide at Phoenix’ astounding Musical Instrument Museum. I have done a lot of volunteer work here and there over the years, but no other assignments compare with the miraculous gifts I have received on every single day of service at MIM. And that also covers the creations of a heaping helping of photographs.

You would think that, after tracing millions of steps over the museum’s vast layout, often with camera in hand, I would have somehow found “the” picture, the image that captures the blessings that this place have conferred upon me. There are pictures of every hall, every meeting room, hundred of exhibits, and thousands of objects in every kind of light, snapped on every imaginable occasion, from concerts to field trips, training sessions to corporate events to award celebrations. There are wide-angles, selective focus art effects, fisheyes, macros, and double exposures, taken with every piece of kit in my arsenal. And yet, after wading through all that in an attempt to draw a line under all my years there, I find that it’s one of the first, almost accidental photos I made in my inaugural year that still has the greatest impact on me.

The guide shown here is instructing a young girl on how to play the Theremin, one of the earliest practical electronic instruments from the 1920’s, and the earliest influence on synthesizer pioneer Robert Moog, who taught himself its magical circuitry by making repairs on surviving models when he was fresh out of college. It’s also the only instrument in MIM’s collection that must be played without touching.

As the image indicates, one needs to be taught how to position one’s hands to create a bit of electrical connection between the device’s two steel poles (which both oscillate at distinct frequencies) and whose silent transmissions can create both audible volume and pitch variations when guided by the player. Explaining the theremin would require a separate technical essay, but that’s not what the picture is “about”. It’s about the wonderment that is playing across the face of the small girl, no doubt a young woman by now, possibly with girls of her own to astound. As I head for the museum’s exit one last time, it is this moment that I will remember, because all of us spent every day in joyful pursuit of That Face. A-Ha moments. Lightbulb moments. I couldn’t capture all of the wonders every day, either by trying to explain them to guests or by photographing them. But this time, this one time, I got lucky, and something magical jumped into my box.

Which is, really, what keeps all of us coming back for more, camera in hand.

Because, at the end of the day, you might go home with a miracle.

And that is music to everyone’s ears.

Every photographer in history has been where you now are, that is, staring into a huge question mark.

By MICHAEL PERKINS

ART IS AT LEAST PARTLY PRODUCED TO BE SEEN, to act as public testimony to the artist’s ideas, a record of his having passed this way. And there is a natural need for that work to be evaluated by others, to be perceived as a common thread in the overall fabric of the human condition. I see a thing, and I  make something that comments on or interprets that thing. And I hope you see what I see.

The problem for art, though, in our increasingly public lives, becomes an exaggerated need for our work to not only be seen but to be approved of. When we post or publish in this age, we are not really looking for a debate or analysis of what we’ve created. Instead, what we seem, increasingly, to be seeking is validation. Likes. That’s a danger to any fully realized sense of art.

Art is solitary. Art is lonely. And the truest of it is generated when we trust our inner pilot light, even when, especially when, no one else “gets it”, or puts a star next to it, or tells us how wonderful we are to have made it. As artists, photographers inherit both the instinct to follow one’s own North Star and the desire to be told how much we are loved. Both urges are normal, but it is the second one which can get us into trouble. I was recently reminded of how grounded Ernst Haas, one of my very favorite photographers, always remained, how he consistently reminds us, through his writings and interviews, that the work counts all by itself, irrespective of result or reward. One quote especially echoes in my head in moments when I worry about “getting it right”:

Every work of art has its necessity; find out your very own. Ask yourself if you would do it if nobody would ever see it, if you would never be compensated for it, if nobody ever wanted it. If you come to a clear ‘yes’ in spite of it, then go ahead and don’t doubt it anymore.

We live in an age that is increasingly defined by how we are regarded by others. And that can make us pre-edit ourselves on the fly, choked by worries about how our work will “play”, as if that had anything to do with why we really do it. So, go, make pictures that may or may not ever garner you a smidgen of approbation. The essential honesty of that act will imbue your work with something that can please you beyond the power of any “like” or heart icon. And that, over time, is all you need to sustain you.