A MODEST DIAGNOSTIC EXERCISE
By MICHAEL PERKINS
AS I WRITE THIS, I AM SUFFERING A SEVERE ATTACK OF GAS.
Not the vaporous lockup of indigestion. We’re talking G.A.S., which is photographer shorthand for Gear Acquisition Syndrome, that vile affliction that makes shooters lust after gear that is erroneously assumed to be “needed”, in order for our picture-making skills to move to the next level. Such objects of desire are also known as Just What I Need, This Will Fix Everything, or Imagine What I Can Do With This Little Baby. Just like Odysseus, who had to be lashed to his ship’s mast to resist the sirens’ songs and thereby wind up wrecked on the shoals, camera buffs have to learn to sit out G.A.S. attacks when they break out, lest they founder their….wallets.
AND it comes equipped with “the new Conley Automatic Front Clip”! Where’s my cheque book?
Sad thing is, at my advanced stage of life (not to be confused with my emotional age, which still lingers in single digits), I no longer have the excuse of ignorance when it comes to being tempted by Bright Shiny Toys. The closets-full of camera gizmos I have been seduced into buying, later shoveling them into the dustbin of Time, have clearly taught me that, of all the gear I’ve purchased over a lifetime, a significant percentage of the haul was collected in the heat of emotion. I am particularly susceptible to the onset of G.A.S. when I am depressed, bored, or creatively stuck. The same thing happens to my wife under the same conditions, only she finds refuge in earrings instead of lenses.
Speaking of lenses, my latest object of desire, a G.A.S. contender if I ever saw one, has virtually nothing to recommend its adoption into my agglomeration of kit. Being a pancake lens, it is spare on features, boasting a fixed aperture (which has been demonstrated to be soft, even chromatically crummy at the edges of the frame). It’s manual-only, which is not, by itself a deal-breaker, but still. Most importantly, it cannot communicate with my camera body in any way. On the upside? It’s cute as hell. Lots of silver, chrome and copper, and it’s tiny, which is its own kind of weird sexy. And did I mention it’s cute?
My current G.A.S. buildup will probably dissipate without my reaching for a credit card. I already have a small fortune invested in prime lenses that actually might have a positive impact on my work, something I can’t honestly say about the little flirt dancing around in my brain at the moment. I will be repeating the non-fun mantra I really don’t need it for the balance of the day and hoping that the fever will break.
But, my God, is that thing cute.
in-DFN-itely
By MICHAEL PERKINS
I CAN STILL REMEMBER A TIME, NOT TOO DISTANT, when the phrase “the camera doesn’t lie” was actually spoken with a more or less straight face. I can only imagine that, at the dawn of photography, in the throes of the first great industrial age, the process of extracting and freezing time in a box was regarded as purely a recording function, like the undulations of a seismograph, as if the camera were the ultimate precision instrument for an ultimately precise, scientific age. In fact, however, fakery of all kinds was in the cradle alongside the camera; frauds were photography’s training wheels. That’s what makes the emergence of A.I. imaging so fraught. We were already manipulating and monkeying with our images using the conventional tools and methods we inherited from the Victorians. Now, suddenly, we can summon increasingly convincing fakes with a simple computer prompt….no camera required.
The joint issues of authorship and authenticity have been upended with A.I., a fact that, at this writing, is hardly a hot bulletin. But it bears repeating, just because our individual reaction to this new “reality” swings wildly between, “Amazing! I can make great use of that” to “ho hum, so what?” to “Oh, God! How can we stop this thing??” Just as it no longer matters whether a novel originates with the writer’s scrawl in a notebook, his taps on a typewriter, or entries in a word processor, we are now in a time when the idea of making a picture has been expanded to include techniques or tools that we once regarded as suspect, or even dishonest. However, if the final image is the desired end result, what do the intermediate steps matter?
An original daylight color shot becomes, with very little effort or strain, a “day-for-night” shot.
One of the first fakeries that I personally played with was the old movie technique known as D.F.N., or “day-for-night”, the exposure and processing methods that allowed crews shooting in broad daylight to suggest post-sundown tonal palettes, without the bother and expense of actually shooting at night. It was the first trick that got me thinking that photographs were far from a definitive record and more like an interpretive canvas, conferring the same fanciful control that painters had always enjoyed. So, years later, which challenges presented by A.I. actually offend or worry us the most? Is it the partial surrender of control to an entity that can’t truly exercise judgment in the creative process? Are we less artistic if we deputize a machine to carry out our desires, and isn’t that precisely what we’ve entrusted cameras to do? The struggle for a new meaning of what a “picture” is will throw some of us into a panic, while others will see it as the most obvious of opportunities for expression. The camera is dead, long live the camera? Or what, really?
SIGNATURE MOVE
By MICHAEL PERKINS
THE LINK BETWEEN CLASSIC CARS AND CALIFORNIA is an incredible, mythic bond, a marriage of American dreams. Even as we and the world are wondering, at least from an environmental standpoint, whether the romance has gone on for too long, even as we tearfully tender divorce papers to our old chrome-encrusted gas guzzlers, we Californians maintain a tearful love for What Was. It’s so easy to find a weekend show-and-shine in Cali that you might be tempted to think that God created strip mall parking lots solely so we’d have an easy way to stage seas of antique Fords and Chevys.
Awash in chrome, the classic logo badge from a 1958 Ford Fairline 500 Sunliner.
As a photographer, I find all this free-ranging power, color and style irresistible, but I’m fairly selective on what the sexiest portions of the entries are. It’s not the squeaky-clean, detailed engine compartments or the custom wheels, not even always the Cruise-Til-Ya-Drop cab appointments. For me, it’s the sheer elegance of the designer’s “signature” on the car, the badges, emblems, hood ornaments and company logos that grace the grills and hoods on the fronts of the cars. The car’s overall lines and contours are sinuous and sleek, to be sure, but it’s where the artist signed his name to his creation that encapsulates everything about the eras and ages that spawned these beauties.
It’s worth remembering that the first great designers of automobiles evolved from the companies that crafted luxury coachwork for horse-drawn carriages. The famous and now-bygone “Body By Fisher” emblem that was stamped onto the door sill plates of GM products for decades is, after all, the image of a coach, a nod to the Fisher family’s original blacksmith-based artisanal works. One of the hallmarks of automotive detailing, during the golden age of motoring, was the company name, branded on the front end with coats of arms, translucent plastic faux-stained glass, and Chrome, oh, my God, so much Chrome framing, well, everything. I dearly love to frame up entire classic cars, to glorify their every curve and cue from headlamp to tail light, but it’s in the small places where the company said, “we built this” that I can hear the roar of the engine, the whistle of the wind, and the squeal of the tires. Long ago, Zenith radios used to brag that “the quality goes in before the name goes on”, and, with classic cars, that signature speaks to excellence, pride, and, yes, a kind of immortality.
RAINY DAY, DREAM AWAY
By MICHAEL PERKINS
MANY PHOTOGRAPHERS WHO SURVIVED THE INTERNATIONAL HOUSE ARREST OF COVID ’19 a few years back now benefit from a cool kind of inoculation, in that they may be forever cured of the dreaded “there’s nothing to shoot” ailment, that perennial complaint that no worthy subject matter is at hand. Certainly, boredom on the kind of global level that we experienced during the pandemic led many of us to dramatically revise our idea of “nothing”, as our houses and apartments became, for a time, our entire living environment, converting our immediate surroundings into ad-hoc studios.
Fasten-ation, 2026
During this sustained universal “sick-in”, I myself managed to document, measure, or comment on every angle, wall, and stick of furniture within my own place, and still found myself scrounging for something, not matter how ordinary or abstract, to photograph. I dug out lenses that had lain layered under dust for decades; I explored the settings that only normally appear on page 763 of the user manual; I catalogued my little behind off. The benefit was real, in that I had to seriously re-think what a picture is “about”, and stop thinking that something about my subject had to be “deserving” of a photo. My work became, in a way, more absolute, in that I was making images just to make images, and nothing more. I also had to change my idea of what subjects I felt I had already “done”, discovering, in more than a few cases, that I could easily take another run at them in search of a new element. And sometimes, of course, I was merely burning up days that suddenly had way too many hour in them.
That isolation, and the improvised approach to “work” that resulted, has stuck with me. I still hit days when I fear that it’s all been done, that everything worthwhile has already been snapped. I still have to force myself to produce something, anything on such days, as you can’t always wait for inspiration to come over you like some kind of spell. There once was a popular cartoon of two vultures sitting together on a tree branch, with one turning to the other and saying, “patience, my ass. I’m gonna kill something.” I like to think that, on a rainy, or quarantine, day, I can still go full-on vulture, if the need arises.
HALL PASS TO HEAVEN
By MICHAEL PERKINS
I WILL ALWAYS LOOK BACK FONDLY UPON MY FIRST, AND MOST TECHNICALLY LIMITED, days as a young photographer. I had gained entry to a world of wonder for the simple investment of five dollars, the cost of my first plastic box camera. The aperture and focus were fixed. There was but a single shutter button. All I could really control was whether I was smart enough to venture out in brilliant sunlight and where I chose to stand. The results, if we’re being kind, were, um, less than optimum. But I was in the club, and in the club I would stay.
The term “point and shoot” was not in great use in those days; that was largely a marketing term designed later to attract those who wanted the camera to do most of the work. And, of course, in the present day, it denotes a level of automatic precision that even so-called “grown-up” cameras couldn’t boast back then. Since that time, I have tried to escape the imposed gravity of that time, attempting to intervene as much as possible in the taking of a picture, to exercise as much personal control over the choices to be made. The idea of simply pointing and shooting, relinquishing my grip over the process, is largely a memory for me all these years later.
But there are exceptions.
Monterey Bay, California, October 10, 2010. 93mm, f/13, ISO 100, 1/100s.
There are still those rare occasions when all you really want to do is capture everything that’s in front of you, quickly, before it is gone. Places and moments where just bearing witness is almost more delight than your heart can hold. On such days, yes, you can agree to let the camera do most of the heavy lifting. You want no other thought in your head beyond Be Here, Now.
The morning of October 10, 2010 was just such a moment. My wife was attending a daylong library conference in downtown Monterey, California, leaving me nearly an entire morning to let the peninsula and bay reveal their miraculous beauty to me. I felt like a court reporter who can barely record a flood of fast testimony from the witness stand. My main thought was I have to get this down. I must have this. And this. And this as well. The entire time span of my random walkabout along the rocky shores near Pacific Grove that morning was probably less than an hour, and yet I felt like I was given some kind of all-access hall pass to heaven. The trip was one of the first real workouts with my new Nikon D60, and so the camera and I were still on a cautious kind of honeymoon. What’ll this thing do? Oh, it does that. Amazing. Because of the newness of our relationship, I was, on that morning, still largely defaulting to full auto on everything I was shooting, a mindset that put me in good stead, as the scenes before me were nearly foolproof; if you could frame it, the D60 would give it to you.
For photographers, being present beyond the distraction of dialing up settings can take a while to learn. There are days when you just want to scoop up everything you see without indulging in every possible calculation. But, like I said, there are exceptions. And when they happen, when they truly sweep you up in their wake, there is no better reminder of why you chose this life.
I COME FROM FAR AWAY
By MICHAEL PERKINS
ONE OF THE LENSES WHOSE PRICE TAG I HAVE NEVER QUITE BEEN ABLE TO JUSTIFY is a dedicated macro, an optic made almost exclusively for super-close work. Perhaps if I had specialized in such shots, almost to the degree of a personal signature, I might have laid out the necessary cash, but my normal bent is to buy lenses that do at least two things well and cut down on the one-trick-ponies when I can. Call me cheap (as indeed, I am) but most of my glass is capable of at least a limited bit of multitasking. If macro ability is one of several tricks a lens can do (the Lensbaby Velvet series comes readily to mind) then great. Fact is, over the last ten years, I have done most of my macro work with a telephoto.
A parasol held by a woman dancing to a concert in a crowded courtyard some forty feet away from me. My Nikkor 180-600mm zoomed in for a faux-macro shot that I could never have made at close quarters. And with an aperture of f/6.3, I got good detail almost to the back edge of the umbrella.
I have certainly done my share of precariously hovering mere inches from a blossoming bloom, but I have achieved results that are just as satisfying standing thirty feet or more away from the flower and zooming in. Thing is, I hadn’t realized for years how many other people were doing the exact same thing. There are distinct advantages, such as a better control of natural light (my body can’t cast shadows on something from which I’m so far removed), a more generous depth of field (macros tend to be pretty shallow), and the ability to sneak into places that are too congested close at hand (like, for instance, the five other photographers who decided that they’d like to frame up “your” rose at the same time you’re trying it).
Of course, zooming in tight enough to produce great results with minute details is not without its problems. For one thing, there’s the stability issue. The farther away you zoom from, the greater is the risk of camera shake, where even minor movements like a shaky breath will be magnified to blurry effect. There is also the need to isolate your subject from the stuff behind or beside it, since that can create a cluttered result. The case I’m making here is not necessarily that packing a true macro isn’t a great idea at times. It’s really my ongoing argument for heading out with as little gear as possible, since a bagful of over-specialized glass can be weighty, unwieldy, and increases the risk of missed shots that flit away while you’re changing from one lens to another. If there’s one sentence I try to live by these days, it’s do the most with the least. A telephoto that occasionally doubles as a macro is one step toward that ideal.
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SERMON FROM A TOPPLED PULPIT
By MICHAEL PERKINS
(FIRST OF ALL, a loving welcome to all our most recent subscribers. You are the nourishment that feeds this beast. Thankee.)
TO RESTATE THE TERMS OF ENGAGEMENT for anyone entering this movie after the first reel, The Normal Eye has never been a photographic “how to”, since the world at large is fairly overrun by technical experts who can offer much more qualified testimony than I can, on gear, or what makes it work. If anything, this little small-town gazette is more of a “why do”, a perpetually unanswered question on the motivations behind why we make pictures. I can only safely recount what has worked for me, and me alone. If something in my process sparks an idea for you, swellwonderfulgroovy, but my notes here are just diary entries, not preachments. You do you, and all that.
I mean, think about it.
I’d really have to have some nerve to recommend or prescribe anything for anyone when, a significant portion my work fits into a very fat “WTF” (Weirdly Troubling Fotos) folder, composed of stuff I myself do not understand, as if, looking at them long after I shot them, I’m actually reviewing the work of a complete stranger. I’d actually love to have a picture of my own expression as I leaf through this stuff, always with the same questions. What is this? Why did I think that would be a picture? Why don’t I remember ever having done this?, and so on and so on. Far from communicating some golden eternal truths to the world at large, some of my photographs manage to confound even me. Especially me.
I’m sure I’m not alone in this. You no doubt have some kind of WTF folder of your own, stacks of misbegotten, weird-ass orphan images that seem to have jumped, unbidden, out of your camera. How could you not? Creative urges are just that, urges, and ofttimes make no more sense than one’s decision to, yes, please, have a third hot dog. And so, as we go forward, I always like to pause a mo, to re-state that The Normal Eye is more of a journal (journey? journal!) than a blog. Over its fifteen years, it’s been the closest thing to a running testimony on where I’ve tried to go as a photographer, and as a person. It’s not a blueprint for anyone, nor a bread crumb trail to help you find your way out of your personal dark forest. It’s justa buncha pitchers, flavored by some random ruminations, with all the lucky keepers at the front of the stage and all the WTF detours as a painted backdrop. Cheers and welcome.
WHAT ARE WE SELLING HERE?
By MICHAEL PERKINS
PHOTOGRAPHERS WHO ARE ALSO BABY BOOMERS learned their craft in a unique pocket of time, a period that saw an astounding series of breakthroughs in the art and science of picture-making. I could make a day of just ticking off aspects of the art that have been revolutionized, miniaturized, re-formatted, re-invented and re-tooled in my lifetime, which tracks from 1952 onward. However, just to zero in on one fundamental change, there is the transition from the last days of the complete dominance of monochrome to the global default to color. It was like learning to chew with baby teeth and then doing your serious, growed-up eating with your “keeper” teeth.
I shot this rusty door in both color and monochrome. In this particular case, mono “sold” the worn texture a little better. It’s all about choices….
When I first picked up a camera, many amateurs had not yet made the jump to color, mostly for economic reasons. B/W was just cheaper. For others, home developing largely involved mono, while color processing tended to be the domain of labs. Black and White was more hands-on, with its various steps and stages serving as a part of an immersive, complete sequence of creativity. And then there was the distrust of color by creatives at the level of an Ansel Adams, who grudgingly worked in color but embraced monochrome, given that, in his opinion, the reproduction science for color work in print had not yet been perfected, and while he could easily control (and predict) the results of his mono images. Given these factors and several others, I, like many others in Boomerville, cut my particular set of baby teeth learning to make acceptable pictures in black and white. My dad, who had an actual job, and thus a little more disposable income to play with, shot in color.
And so, for me, to have lived long enough to enter a third phase, in which black and white has made it through the unofficial runner-up status conferred on it when color first hit its stride…to come out the other side of that time tunnel, newly empowered, newly valued as just one of many valid ways to make a picture…well, it’s exciting. When I shoot now, I frequently toggle between pre-programmed settings profiles for both color and mono, taking several different tonal versions of nearly everything. I can then make a determination, later on, on the major questions in photographic narrative: what are we selling here? What tools get the storytelling most effectively done? What tone, what texture, what range of value will convey what I’m seeking? And, most importantly, can I be open when something I was not seeking comes through by happy chance? I was born a mono kid who became a color shooter as an adult and then came to embrace everything, everyday, all at once as a senior. Lucky.
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HOORAY FOR STANLEYWOOD
One of the figures of the three muses (Music, seen here), dance, and drama, created by sculptor George Stanley for the monumental fountain which serves as the entrance to the Hollywood Bowl in Los Angeles.
By MICHAEL PERKINS
LA LA LAND, BEING THE CHIEF MANUFACTURER OF DREAM IMAGES FOR THE WORLD, has seen, in its century-and-a-quarter history, many of those images flicker and be forgotten once the title THE END flickers off the screen. However, both in and out of the movies, Los Angeles at large has seen visual souvenirs of its various eras survive to become icons that outlast time, forever emblematic of a city that feeds on the frenetic energy of hope. These symbols of L.A. life are visited or seen by millions, their origins rendered irrelevant, as if they, like the mountains and the tar pits, have simply always been here.
George Stanley’s sculpture of Sir Issac Newton (at right), taking its place among other sculptors’ tributes to great astronomers at the entrance to Griffith Observatory in L.A.
The names of some of the creators of these landmarks survive, and others, like sculptor George Stanley, morph into questions on Jeopardy or side entires on Wikipedia. But that’s a little ungrateful of us. as we adore the man’s works with no notion of the man himself. Like many Angelenos, George Maitland Stanley was an immigrant from within greater America, arriving in the 19-oughts from a small parish in Louisiana, growing up in the town of Watsonville near Monterey Bay. In 1923 he enrolled in L.A.’s Otis Art Institute, where he studied and later taught sculpture, before transferring to the Santa Barbara School for the Arts, where he was also on the faculty. George’s first major commission, and the one which made him renowned to this day, was the sculpting for the Oscar statuette, which he designed in 1927 from a sketch by an MGM executive and which can arguably claim to be the most famous sculpture in the world.
The first third of the twentieth century was an insane growth spurt for Los Angeles, and George Stanley had a literal hand in the symbology for some of its most enduring destinations. The circle of statues that celebrate the world’s essential astronomers, which graces the front entrance to Griffith Observatory, was a collective work, with a separate commission issued for each of the scientists on the plinth. Stanley sculpted the figure of Sir Issac Newton in 1934. Just six years later, he created yet another indelible marker of California culture, creating the streamlined Deco fountain that ushers concertgoers onto the grounds of the Hollywood Bowl. The triple sculpture that crowns three corners of the two-hundred-foot-side fountain base, depicts the three muses of Music, Dance and Drama, and stands over twenty-five feet tall. Situated just where freeway traffic exits the 101 and spills onto Highland Avenue, the fountain has become a kind of unofficial front gate for Hollywood itself.
Stanley’s frieze for the entrance to Bullock’s Department Store on Wilshire Boulevard, 1929.
Stanley’s other works, some of which do not survive to the present day, include the dramatic frieze atop the main entrance to the majestic Bullock’s department store building, as well as some reliefs and murals at various churches scattered across the state. In a town that worships image, he created the visual signatures of many essential local landmarks, and photographers and historians alike have long realized that you cannot tell with story of Los Angeles without citing his elegant touch.
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LIGHTNING IN A BOTTLE
In shooting children’s activities, you only have a nanosecond to find the central story.
By MICHAEL PERKINS
IF YOU WERE TO CONNECT THE ENERGY OF A ROOMFUL OF CHILDREN to a dynamo, you could power the eastern seaboard and have enough power left over to make all the marquees in Time Square blink “Happy Birthday”in Morse code. Making photographs of kids is just slightly less challenging than snapping images of summer lightning. They are dynamic, unpredictable, driven by whim, and poised on a knife’s-edge. And that’s their resting state.
For a photographer, shooting kids is both a treat and a trap. A treat, because, within seconds, you are presented with more visual information than you can use in a year, and a trap, because what you select or capture out of that flow can either be the very definition of storytelling or its dead opposite. Happening by when a flock of children are sharing an activity, with all the joy, risk and, yes, competition that’s on display (Mom! watch me!!), a photographer has to make insanely fast choices of what to scoop up and what to leave alone. With luck, he/she delivers a great narrative, a shot which contextualizes and explains itself in an instant, a document of the joy of being young. But, without luck (or judgement), the result is, well, a picture of kids playing.
One slider, many background participants. But is this the story you’re seeking?
Of course, such moments cannot, dare not, be coached or posed, meaning that their importance must be weighed, then gathered or rejected, in an incredibly short amount of time. No one second can be repeated or replicated: it’s either caught or it escapes. If the overall story line of the two pictures shown here is “sliding down a hill”, that message can actually be muddled by the right mixture of visual information. For example: how many active sliders need to be shown in motion at one time, when getting the number wrong can potentially drag the eye all over the frame without asking it to focus on a central impact? If the emphasis is on the throng, then the top shot is an example of a potential keeper. However, if one child is all that’s needed to demonstrate the activity, with the other kids shown in various stages of preparation, then the second frame will deliver. Of course, in all candor, I’ve not shown, here, the other seven frames I originally took, where all these “missions” get even muddier or less organized. Child photography is true photography, in that the act of extracting an instant from the constant flow of time could not be clearer than in trying to isolate an ideal illustration of their play. Getting it right really is equivalent to capturing lightning in a bottle
THE ZOOM AFTER THE ZOOM
A sort of “Where’s Waldo?” zoom shot in which “Waldo” is played by a well-concealed baby Bullock’s oriole.
By MICHAEL PERKINS
PHOTOGRAPHERS, AT LEAST ON THE LOGICAL HALF OF THEIR BRAIN, know that purchasing X kind of gear will not necessarily solve all of their picture-making problems. Screwing on a fresh lens or body is, by itself, no guarantee that you will “get” any more satisfying images than you do at present. I mean, put one of us on a polygraph and ask, “do you believe that this new whatsis that you bought will transform you into a master shooter, and we’ll answer “no” without hesitation.
That’s the logical answer, after all.
Of course, creatives are not wholly logical, and so, when breaking in a new bit of kit, there is a decidedly emotional honeymoon period during which you do, briefly, dream that, now, all your problems will be magically solved. And so, getting past that phase, and realizing that, yes, despite the new toy, you still will come home empty some days, and, yes, you still will make mistakes and blow a percentage of your pictures.
THERE you are, you little bugger…
My recent move up to a 600mm lens for nature work was, for a short while, one such honeymoon. I would now bag bundles of elusive birds in a fashion never dreamt of before! Slinging a five-pound optic on my aging shoulders for hours at a stretch would be transformative! I would wonder how I ever managed before this day, etc., etc., etc.
Somehow, I still find that the gear, as well as myself, has limits. Check the initial frame, at the top of the page, that resulted from me trying to find a baby oriole in a twisted mass of rusted fencing from about 100 yards away, zoomed all the way out to 600mm. The bird is actually in the image, but it took “the zoom after the zoom”, i.e., a severe crop of over 50%, to reveal the little guy, a move which also resulted in the final image having barely enough resolution to make it fit for viewing on a monitor. The lens did everything it could, but it’s not a mystical portal: it’s a physical optic with limits, those limits being largely defined by, gulp, its user. Of course, I can talk myself down by noting that most of nature photography invokes the Maxwell Smart phrase, “missed it by that much!” and that using my equipment better will eventually up my average. But all such thoughts involve logic. Truth is, this little bird brat has hurt my feelings, and I want to marinate in that for a moment. I need a cuppa tea.
GASLIGHTING WHILE GLASS PLATING
By MICHAEL PERKINS
THE 19th CENTURY ENTREPRENEUR P.T. BARNUM, the Victorian era’s grand master of humbuggery, marketed the unbelievable and the fantastic to millions with a wink to his audiences, as if he knew that they knew that this or that latest marvel was an utter fraud, but that it was all in good fun, since his customers loved to be lied to almost as much as he loved taking their dimes and quarters to accommodate their desire to be snookered. In that way, Barnum foretold the relationship we in the 21st century still have with fakery. It is thus easy to see how A.I. slop has continued to blur the line between the real and unreal, especially as regards photographs. If you want to see what we’ll fall for, look back at what we have already fallen for.
In 1861, the re-use of an improperly re-cleaned glass plate in the lab of photographer William Mumler made his finished print appear to show his own self-portrait “accompanied” by the shadowy figure of a girl. Mumler wrote the whole thing off as a lark, and forgot all about it until a spiritualist journal concluded that he had, in fact, captured a ghost inside his camera. Such publications were thriving in the back half of the 19th century, as the world was enthralled by the study of paranormal phenomena, and, smelling an easy payday, Mumler began marketing himself as the possessor of a unique “spirit camera”, scheduling sittings for bereaved people eager to pose with their departed loved ones. Insane? Well, consider in context: photography was such a new craft at the time that many were uncertain just what feats were even possible for it. After all, a soulless machine that could freeze time? Create a convincing record of reality with greater fidelity than the most skilled painter alive? What couldn’t the camera do?
Mumler made mad stacks of cash, and not only from the suckers, er, sorry, believers who flocked to his studio to be photographically reunited with the departed; he also played upon the grief and sentiment of the public at large, selling prints of the widowed Mary Todd Lincoln, seeming to be comforted by the ectoplasmic presence of her slain husband. The entire business seemed threatened when the Grand Fakeroo of the World, no less than P.T. Barnum himself, commissioned a photographer to create an image of himself with a shadowy presence in the background to demonstrate how easily the “spirit” effect could be achieved, and testified personally against Mumler at his trial for fraud. Acquitted by a judge, Muller simply started up where he had left off, cranking out the ghost pictures while also conducting legitimate experiments. At his death in 1884, he was celebrated for his greatest technical success, a system that made it possible to generate affordable and accurate prints from photo-electrotype plates, a technique which is still called the Mumler process. These days, with fraud walking hand-in-hand with art in the new golden age of manipulated images, it’s fascinating to remind ourselves of just how baked-in fakery has been across the entire history of photography. The camera may not lie, as the old saying goes, but the person holding the camera will often bear watching.
PLANE GEOGRAPHY
By MICHAEL PERKINS
Three Worlds, M.C. Escher, 1955
LOOKING THROUGH MY FAVORITE IMAGES, either hand or camera-created, I have always been drawn to those that ride a tightrope between discovery and mystery, balancing delicately between what is revealed and what is concealed. For me, viewing a composition, whether in a painting, drawing or photograph, I am, of course, intrigued by what the artist chose to include in the frame, but I am just as fascinated by the decisions that were made as to what to leave out of it. By choosing something, the framer is un-choosing every other possible choice. That very deliberate action, to me, is the essence of picture-making.
I once heard a boorish person described as someone who could add something to a room just by leaving it. I probably have been that person several dozen times without knowing it. But in visual art, subtractions can often function as additions of a sort. The act of creating a photograph, as I myself practice it, is the presentation of certain information that also implies information that I’ve withheld. Three Worlds, the M.C. Escher illustration show above, is a perfect example of how these artistic choices can spur curiosity. Here, in the single plane of the water surface, both the life of the forest above and that of the pond below are suggested, and yet the three “worlds” remain more suggested than displayed. We never have the complete reality of either the forest or the pond spelled out in full. In fact, there is more detail provided in the leaves floating on the water than in the selective depiction of the other two realities. The leaves act as a portal between two other disparate states that will forever remain largely unexplained. The result is tantalizing, a tease for the mind that results in deeper speculation. The viewer’s mind is fully engaged.
Skywalkers, Michael Perkins, 2026
In the other image, the very under-explained aspect of the reflective surface is designed to ask more questions than it answers. The viewer is free to speculate, to wonder, to try to decipher what, actually, he is looking at. Most importantly, no final answer needs be rendered, just as no explanatory caption is required. The image simply is, whether or not the individual attaches anything extra to it. The wall between reveal and conceal is inviolate, and should be. Any discussion is legitimate, as is no discussion at all. Pictures can be “about” things, or they merely be about themselves. Riding that tightrope between “is it?” and “it is” is a big part of the fun.
GOING HOME FULL
By MICHAEL PERKINS
I KNOW SEVERAL PHOTOGRAPHERS who evaluate a shooting day the way they might evaluate a round of golf, as if they had to total up a score of some kind to measure either success or failure. Their internal grading systems declare a given outing to be a bust, a win, a waste of time, or a revelation, with many bemoaning those occasions on which they “go home empty”, which, I guess, means they either “found nothing to shoot” (an idiotic notion IMHO) or “didn’t get any good shots”(another concept I have a problem with, since all photography is instructional and thus cannot be wasted time unless you waste it yourself) The idea of putting a day’s shooting into some arbitrary “pass or fail” column strikes me, to say the least, as missing the effing point.
Taken on a birdwalk in which the birding was marginal but the walking was divine.
When I began birding, I found I had to re-think what the object of a photo shoot was. I first went into it the way a fisherman might judge the day’s catch, that is, by how many trout were in the creel when I headed home. In such a mind set, any day I did not “bag” the correct(?) number of bird images was a bad day. It was as if I had been assigned by some cosmic editor to bring back a certain amount of “product” and had failed the assignment. Thing is, watching birds isn’t about what the rest of the world wants or demands. It’s about mindfulness, about being fully present in the moment. In terms of photographs, it’s the only way you will be able to even approach snapping subjects that are generally elusive and non-cooperative. Only paying full attention to what’s in front of you will mentally prepare you to make a visual comment on it, which is what happens when you choose to photograph, well, anything.
The other thing that anchors me in the moment is being just as mindful of my immediate surroundings beyond the birds. Not all walks are birdwalks, but all birdwalks are walks, each with its own features and compositional possibilities. Some of my favorite landscape images were the byproduct of days when days on which The Birds Aren’t Happening, or when I was far less adept than my companions at spotting this or that species and naturally began to look for something else to train my gaze on. Happily, I now can head back after a day when no usable bird pictures resulted, yet still not feel as if I “went home empty”. Empty is a manifestation of the mind. It’s just one of many mental program switches that you can toggle on or off. Photographs don’t just happen when everything’s perfect, or else no one would ever shoot anything. Run what you brung, shoot what comes along. It’s the attitudinal equivalent of A Bird In The Hand.
SAME CANVAS, FRESH STROKES
By MICHAEL PERKINS
DUCK INSIDE ANY GIFT SHOP IN A BEACH TOWN and you are immediately awash in paintings, shirts, mugs, posters and assorted other bric-a-brac of the area’s most familiar tourist attraction, captured and immortalized in any and every medium. Want a potholder that will remind you of your great time in Lake WhattaLoada every time you take a sheet of cookies out of the oven? Right over there, sir. Lotsa sale items, too.
What such displays demonstrate is just how closely we all tend to agree on “what’s to see around here”, as well as just how tough it is to bring anything fresh or new to the 5,000,000th view of the gorgeous local waterfall, the awesome local ruins, the vibrant local boardwalk, etc., etc. Strangely, this can mean that, say, the Eiffel Tower may be among the hardest things on earth to photograph, because everything, but I mean everything, has already been said about it. Every visitor “destination” presents a similar challenge, as you become just the latest schnook to try to snap that town’s Great Historic Whatsis.
In Ventura, California, the G.H.W. is the local pier, which, in one form or another, has stretched into the Pacific just opposite the downtown since it was opened in 1872 as a transportation hub and commercial wharf used to bring merchandise and lumber to the area and to export the area’s agricultural products and crude oil. These days it is used for fishing and as a pedestrian walkway with views of Ventura and the Channel Islands, which stretch North and South about an hour’s sail from shore. Over the years, Mother Nature has spanked, split and splintered her dozens of times, and time and time again, the city fathers/mothers choke up the cash to patch her up for the tourists and locals. It is impossible to imagine Ventura (original town name San Buenaventura, given that every third locality here is named after a saint) without the thing.
And so, now that I myself am a local, it photographically haunts me, or rather dares me to find something, anything fresh to do with it as a subject. I attack it from every angle or aspect, and always seem to snap into the same track as all the other human satellites orbiting around it. And, as I say, the shops in town are like a kaleidoscopic gallery of all the various attempts made by folks like me. We’ll never actually master it. But taking our shot is beyond irresistible, like trying to swim against the tide. The canvas doesn’t change; the only real difference is which brushstroke we choose…….
HONEY, I (SHOULDA) SHRUNK THE CAMERA BAG
By MICHAEL PERKINS
TWO YEARS AGO THIS MONTH, I changed residence for the first time in a quarter century. The actual implementation time for the relocation was in short supply, as the last weeks before the vans rolled were jammed with weighty decisions. Given that Marian and I were moving to an apartment half the size of our house, tough calls had to be made. I jettisoned thousands of CDs, hundreds of books, a Goodwill store full of outdated apparel and a crap-ton of assorted junque.
However…
I brought every single lens with me.
No tearful goodbyes for the various speciality glass and one-trick optical ponies I’d accumulated over the past twenty-five. And it’s not that certain gadgets here and there shouldn’t have gone to their glory. I just lacked the guts to push the button, and so a short life-time of gear and gimmicks made the journey with us, even as my ongoing evolution in technique had, in recent years, seen me taking pocketfuls, not bags, of kit on my shoots. To put it simply, most of the time, I use fewer and fewer lenses to do more and more. Many days, I go out only with whatever’s mounted on the camera. And, looking around, I am not the only aging shooter who’s come to that decision.
Closest thing I have to a single “go-to”, a manual Nikkor 24mm f/2.8 from 1977.
That said, I never really saw myself as a one-lens-for-everything kinda guy, and so it was amazingly easy to sell me on the wondrous properties of the next lens I’d buy. Surely that next hunka glass was going to address whatever shortcomings there were in my style and vision. And yet, I could be spare when I wanted to. It wasn’t as if I couldn’t make fewer lenses do more. After all, The Normal Eye was borne out of my exclusive use of a 50mm, or “normal” prime lens for an entire year, not to win a bet or a dare, but because my work needed re-grounding, a re-set after too many years of pictures that were little more than family candids. Keeping the emphasis on my own mindfulness rather than on tools accomplished that. Regardless, my interest in other, more specialized optics grew over time, even though I would actually use many of them only on occasion, and hardly enough to justify lugging them all around with me on trips “just in case’. Oscar Wilde, on his deathbed, reputedly remarked, “either that wallpaper goes, or I do.” Similarly, either my work was going to grow, or the goodie bags needed to haul an increasingly unwieldy arsenal of glass were. So it’s time for a little tough love.
I’ve spent the two years since the move going through the lens trove, attaching each of them in turn to bodies, and taking each out for a run to see if they really still justify their continued status as dust collectors. I already know that I am going to continue to run leaner in terms of what actually gets packed up to accompany me on shoots. My last trip anywhere saw me leaving the house with two, count them, two lenses total. That, for me, is crash diet. The question is whether I can actually divest myself of the extra junk or continue to haul it out for occasional sessions of polishing and dreaming. I keep hearing Ralph Waldo Emerson’s exhortation to “simplify, simplify” and contemplating just how much camera I actually need to get a given job done.
It’s a process.
LET’S BE TOGETHER, ALONE
By MICHAEL PERKINS
PHOTOGRAPHERS NATURALLY SEEK PUBLIC SPACES, looking for the individual stories that travel through great halls, museums, places of worship, centers of commerce. If you want to observe the ants, your must seek out the anthills. Certainly, we are also drawn to quiet venues that are less densely populated, but to get a sense of interaction, of human-on-human transactions and encounters, vast, crowded places have a definite narrative appeal.
But grand spaces, at least for me, can act counterintuitively if the crowds in them on a given day are too sparse. That is, they work counter-intuitively. Big areas that are only partially filled, or even nearly empty, can strike me as lonelier than a single solo stroller on a rural road. It’s the contrast, visually and emotionally, between designs that were made to accommodate thousands and the empty feeling created when only a few dozen are on hand to fill those huge cavities. In images, it can be made to suggest a very intense isolation created when an individual is patrolling areas intended for huge throngs. The scale of things changes the terms.
A single seeker in a big woods looks like an idyllic communion with nature, whereas a solo wanderer in a huge man-made space suggests loneliness. I can’t explain it; I only know that, pictures-wise, the setting shifts the effect from Guy Getting Away From It All to Last Man On Earth. Context in photography isn’t everything, any more than any other single element. But it is a lot when it comes to showing the difference between “alone” and “lonely”. Some of this goes to the biases of the individual photographer, of course, and that’s why there is more than one of us trying to do this job. Still, I am always surprised when a single factor in the making of an image goes from important to crucial. Space, and how it gets filled or not filled, is one of the most decisive of those factors. We show what we see and we see what we feel.
CONTEMPLATING THE FLICKER
By MICHAEL PERKINS
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!—William Shakespeare, Macbeth
I AM NOT THE TYPE TO USE SOCIAL MEDIA TO TRAIN THE MICROSCOPE on the details of my private life. In my view, there are some things to be shared, and some things to be held in reserve. I know that, in the age of full viral disclosure, such a sentiment is counter-intuitive, maybe even quaint. Can’t help it. I go through a lot of things as a human, and some of them are simply not for public consumption.
All of which is to say that, as I write this, I am sailing through some tricky emotional waters. Neither the cause nor the cure is the point, really, so, again, most of what I’m feeling will be of an inner-dialogue nature only. It’s enough to say that certain mileposts make you more mindful of the fleeting quality of existence, especially as the years advance. And for me, as a photographer, I also wonder if I’ve made anything of lasting value, or at least narrative clarity, as I contemplate the many clicks I’ve accumulated over a lifetime.
That sends me rifling through past work, looking for something that looks how I’m feeling. Sometimes it’s an easy search; other times it’s a slog. What you see here matches my sentiments of the moment, although, when shot, it was merely my way to salute what, for me, was a particularly poignant work of art. Somehow, right now, today, this moment, it’s hitting me in a distinctly different way. Photographs can do that. You snap off a frame for one purpose and find that, over time, the damned thing has grown a whole separate set of arms and legs beyond anything you could envision at the moment of its creation. Some might call that art, although, to me, it’s more like alchemy. Magic.
Anyway, here’s hoping that your most powerful inner feelings occasionally find themselves conducting through your finger to a shutter button, and, from there, to something more lasting. As long as we continue, so does the search.
THE SLOW FADE
By MICHAEL PERKINS
IT USED TO BE SAID OF CERTAIN RAMSHACKLE STRUCTURES that, if the termites inside it ever stopped holding hands, they would disintegrate.
Over the years, roaming with a camera through every kind of borough, village, burg and town, I’ve often wondered what force inside them was still “holding hands” strongly enough to keep them from collapsing or merely blowing away. Photographers, for reasons rooted in too many years of bias and cliche, are naturally drawn to decay, to the impending end of stuff. Not only do we seek out those things that are just about to vanish, but we feel a near moral obligation to document them, ofttimes spending more time capturing the twilights of buildings than we do their grand openings. And so it goes.
Sunbury, Ohio, about twenty miles northeast of Columbus, is a town that has taken its good old time vanishing beneath the waves. It is a master class in the fine art of the slow fade. As far back as I can recall, it has always been in the process of, if you will, going out of business. Its central square comprises nearly the entire town (village?), its businesses in a content state of near vacancy. There are thousands of such towns all across the midwest, places where, at some time, it seemed a good idea to nail two boards together and start some kind of enterprise, driven by jobs, nature, religion, or just an urge to get good and goddamn far away from wherever it was you started. Who knows why we head out for parts unknown, or how we know, yes, this is a good place to stop wandering.
In such places, the storefronts that promise Good Eats, Cafe, Breakfast, or Dine-In-Or-Take-Out act as these towns’ few solid pillars, as if the attractive force of their various Tuesday Lunch Specials is enough to keep the entire encampment from vanishing in the next strong wind. I am drawn to whatever effort is put forth at such joints to dress things up, to liven the display window, hang a little color from the porch, hand-letter the street signs. Now that this picture is about a year old, I almost wish I had walked inside the world of the Sunbury Grille on that day and checked out that was on offer. I’m always careful, however, when snapping images of these places, as if I’m obviously branding myself as an Outsider, someone who is Not From Around Here. Traveling through small-town America is like riding an an uncertain wave that may crest on a high of hospitality or founder on a beach of Otherness. All I can tell, in clicking off a frame or two, is that something in this place is still keeping the lights on, still holding hands.
Ex Machina
By MICHAEL PERKINS
A quick primer on making a camera exposure in the early 19th-century:
- Lens cap off.
2. Lens cap back on.
3. Repeat.
4. Pray.
The photo-tinkerer Thomas Sutton may not have been the first to improve upon this stone-age method of allowing light onto media, but his early mechanical shutters, introduced in the 1860’s, were refined and imitated endlessly across the photographic community, becoming the first essential tool for the control of exposure rates. From that era to this, every camera made anywhere in the world has had some variant on the Sutton shutter as the principal gatekeeper for light. It is the most essential of features, and, as the last purely mechanical component in the picture-making process, is on a kind of extinction watch. It won’t happen quickly, but it’s en route.
Most major manufacturers have, for some time, included in their designs the option for a purely digital shutter, with the mechanical shutter as a default, meaning that you must opt in for the digital. Traditional shutters have “curtains” ahead of the film or sensor, and are opened and closed in micro-seconds. Digital systems are not true “shutters” at all, as there are no physical curtains per se, merely an electronic signal sent to portions of the sensor to be more or less light-sensitive in different parts of the frame as dictated by the exposure chosen by the shooter.
Already, as has been the case when other mechanical camera systems have neared their respective sell-by dates, people are choosing up sides as to which choice is better. Those who favor mechanicals will talk of superior flash syncing, great performance with artificial lighting sources, and more than 150 years of refinement and improvement. Digital shutter fans will point to their much faster speed ranges, reduced vibration and noise, and, most crucially, the lack of material wear-and-tear. Both systems have their boasts and dings, meaning that, for the moment ( A.C.E. 2026 at this writing) both will have their armies of frothing fans, delaying the decision by manufacturers to dump mechanical for good in the name of cost-cutting, customer input, or both.
Many of us, er, revered elders (translation: old coots) have lived long enough to see one mechanical function after another obviated in the modern era, just as the complex systems of analog processing were supplanted (not replaced outright) by digital imaging. One man’s modern miracle is another’s sacrilege, and so the shutter wars will take a while to shake out. Eventually, we find ourselves asking just was a camera is, with the only logical answer being the eternal one: that which facilitates the making of an image.
thenormaleye 