THE MOMENT WHEN THE MASK SLIPS
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.
WEATHER OR NOT
Instant rainy day: an in-camera white balance tweak designed to simulate shooting under florescent light
By MICHAEL PERKINS
NO SOONER DID PHOTOGRAPHERS SUCCEED in their earliest attempts at trapping light inside a box than they set about to see what kind of light they might prefer on any given day. From the very start, shooters have tried to shape the color and tonal range of their subjects rather than just record the prevailing conditions. To cite one f’rinstance: when I was a youngster, riding my pet bronto to the classroom cave, all sophisticated cameras came with instructions on how to achieve an ideal white balance, the better to either correct for nature’s shortcomings in a certain situation, or sculpt your own look for effect. Half a century later, it’s amazing just how easy such manipulations have become in the digital age.
Same scene, mere seconds beforehand, shot on an “natural light auto” white balance.
Now white balance is simply another dial-up operation, something that can be as easily selected as an aperture or a shutter speed. Suddenly all those screw-on filters and charts are just so much junk in a drawer. It’s amazing how baked-in this kind of convenience has become, removing what used to be a time-consuming calculation not only making it completely instinctual but virtually instantaneous. We are now capable of, if you like, making our own weather ahead of the click.
Like everything else that used to be a pain about photography, the streamlining of white balance has joined many other operations that were obstacles between envisioning and executing a shot. That means greater and greater emphasis on training one’s eye and less time wasted on “I wonder if it will work out?”. All cameras are being designed to anticipate most of the problems involved in making a picture, so that it’s harder every day to take a bad one (although I stubbornly manage to do it, and often). Creating tools which take things like white balance and light metering inside the camera streamlines the entire process of photography. Fewer steps, fewer chances for error, more time for selecting and grabbing your vision.
THE VERY PICTURE OF….ANOTHER PICTURE
By MICHAEL PERKINS
I CAN’T BE THE ONLY PERSON WHO HAS EVER SEEN this classic image of photographer Margaret Bourke-White peering over a stainless-steel projection near the top of the Chrysler Building and asked themself, “so who in heck is taking this picture?”
Oh sure, we know the basics of the story. In 1930, The skyscraper’s owners invited the already-renowned MBW to set up her wooden view camera on one of the structure’s eight gleaming eagle’s heads at the 61st floor, and take in what was then an extremely privileged view of Manhattan. The building, not yet quite completed, would eventually top out at 1,046 feet (77 stories) above the pavement, winning one of the city’s most celebrated “skyscraper wars”, cinching its right to Tallest stature by virtue of the gigantic steel spire that served as its crown. Bourke-White, whose studio was then located in Cleveland, had already considered moving to NYC to be nearer her employers at Fortune magazine, and once she ascended to take in the, er, eagle’s-eye view, she decided that the Chrysler itself should be her new HQ, all the better for her to be the two eagles on the corner where she shot, which she nicknamed “Min” and “Bill” after a popular movie of the time.
But who else made the ascent that day, to take a picture of her.. taking a picture?
Introducing the nearly-forgotten Oscar Graubner, Margaret’s full-time darkroom assistant and amateur snapper, who often traveled with Bourke-White on what was, by the early ’30’s, already a global trajectory, a career which would take her from the opening of hydroelectric dams (the first Life magazine cover ever) to photo-essays in the young Soviet Union to, eventually, every major theatre in the European war and the India-Pakistan schism. Graubner was part of what built MBW’s nickname of “Maggie The Indestructible”, and, by chance, snapped the best image of her at work. Strangely, his picture of her doing her thing from the top of the Chrysler has now been viewed many millions of times more than any pictures she actually made herself from up there. The history of photography may be peopled by giants, but it’s punctuated by those who toil in their immense shadows.
CURTAIN CALL
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.
JOLLY JOB ONE
By MICHAEL PERKINS
THE CLARK GRISWOLD IDEAL of Christmas illumination, in which one’s house resembles an iridescent birthday cake ablaze in billions of blinks, is now so fixed in the American mind that it can make those who decorate with restraint or modesty seem downright Scroogish. ‘Tis the season to be excessive, to be loud. And, yes, even as I write these words I sound, even to myself, like the neighborhood crank who keeps all kids’ balls that bounce into his yard. Still.
The idea of slathering the outside of the house with cascades of yuletide lights, to say nothing of the army of inflatables that now fill ever-increasing numbers of front yards, was, in my youth, either not yet technically possible, or economically feasible, or both. Or maybe things were quieter. They were certainly simpler, something that, as my photographer’s eye ages (along with the rest of me), I appreciate more and more. Saying more with less has proven to be the hardest lesson I ever learned about making pictures, and I readily admit that I am drawn to subject matter that conforms to that notion of visual economy.
That’s why I’m sad that my neighbor has sold his house.
The idea of using one’s front picture window as the simple yet ideal frame for the holiday tree was the focal point of my Christmases growing up. Get the tree perfect, let it alone speak to the mood of those who dwell within, and give a glimpse of all that joy to the outside world with a peek through the pane. And then, stop. Undersell the message. Let peace carry the moment. That was the tradition at the mostly dark house across from ours for many years (seen here), a house that is now merely empty. In a world where Silent Nights have become blaring battles instead of calming invitations, the folks down the street decided to play their particular carol on the soft pedal. And I will miss it, much more than I ever could have imagined.
LAND OF SCROOGE AND CRATCHIT
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.
I KNOW WHY THE (UN)CAGED BIRD SINGS
By MICHAEL PERKINS
JOHN JAMES AUDUBON NEVER EMBRACED THE NASCENT ART OF PHOTOGRAPHY, which was only just out of its crib when the naturalist and artist passed in 1851. More’s the pity: his studies, and the magnificent paintings which resulted from them, were only accomplished by the killing of nearly all of the four hundred species he depicted, a technique well in line with practices of the 1800’s but regarded with horror by today’s birders. Photographs, in his lifetime, were a curiosity, certainly no competition for the observation and focus required to capture nature on canvas. And so it goes.
I have repeatedly credited my wife in these pages for retraining my eye regarding birds, which I certainly noticed over the courts of my life but didn’t really see. As someone who has always had a camera hanging around his neck, I have, since her miraculous intervention, experienced successive waves of “where the hell I have I been?” when naively delighting in creatures that she has been keenly aware of for decades. Fortunately, unlike Audubon, I don’t have to catch, shoot or poison them just to get a good look at their habits or habitats, as it’s rewarding enough just to be able to linger over the details of their design and grace in pictures. Sadly, I should have begun this journey as a much younger man.
Making a photograph of a bird is a privilege.
Hang with birders for even a short while, and you will be stunned by how very much you do not, but should, know about creatures whose life is impacted, impoverished and just plain crowded out by our very existence, by our selfish gluttony and plunder of all things natural. It’s not just that we are just the loud, rude neighbors down the block: it’s as if we decided to throw empty beer bottles and cigarette butts from our parties over the back fence and into the yard next door. Birds are both a reminder of the infinite beauty built into the world and a rebuke to the unwitting war we wage against it. To measure what is either threatened or vanishing, you need a reliable recording tool….faster, more accurate, and less deadly than Audubon’s slay-’em-and-then-salute-’em method. For millions, including myself, that’s a camera.
The Audubon Society is currently undertaking the sizable task of changing the names of all birds who were identified by the names of humans. Not merely the more notoriously racist or rapaciously heedless of them, Audubon and John Muir among them, but any humans. The names will now merely be descriptive of the individual bird’s identifying characteristics, making their labels more purely scientific and perhaps sending at least a small signal that the earth is ours to inhabit, not conquer; to cherish, not dominate; to curate, not capture. And to learn, as the makers of all too many cages, why the uncaged bird sings so clearly and so beautifully.
OF GOLDFISH AND MEMORY
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.
BLANK CANVASES
By MICHAEL PERKINS
I GENERALLY STEER CLEAR OF THE WORD “ABSTRACT“, since, like many other terms of art, it has been bludgeoned, by misuse and repetition, into a blunt instrument, rather than the surgical tool it might have been. If the word means, as one dictionary has it, something “disassociated from any specific instance” or, in another, as “expressing a quality apart from an object“, then it actually becomes a fairly accurate way of defining what happens when one art beholds another. We take the object away from its original context, or redefine it in our own terms. We begin to personally possess it, using words or pictures to say, “I know what this was ‘supposed’ to be . This is what this is to me.”
In this way, a person with a camera can approach any subject, regardless of its “actual” history, as if it were a blank canvas.
I approach the building seen here in exactly that way. Originally, it was a church of some kind, and by “some kind” I mean of the ooky-spooky, not-of-this-world variety. Hey, no judgement. The pyramid cap up top was deemed significant in some way in the overall design, but, as the place had long since been de-sanctified and put to other purposes by the time I first encountered it, the intent of the creator(s) has been lost to me….hence the “blank canvas”. The structure has no history at all, at least as far as my eye is concerned, freeing me to assign any meaning (or no meaning) to it pretty much at will.
Strategy-wise, part of the making of this image is an attempt to tie the building to something ethereal or mystical, leading me to shoot in monochrome for mood and using an f/16 aperture to convert the midday sun from a blinding glob to a multi-pointed starburst. I also decided to jack the contrast to extreme levels and darkened the insanely bright Arizona sky into something foreboding, imbuing the passing clouds with a bit of menace. The result? A temple? An alien mother ship? A gateway to another dimension? Your rules and your choice. The structure, as I came upon it, meant nothing to me, and so I got to determine its meaning. Or “a” meaning. And that, to me at least, is abstraction. Or maybe it was just a way to kill fifteen minutes while waiting on my wife. Or maybe I live in a world in which both things are true.
HELLO GOODBYE
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…”
UNANCHORED
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.
TATTOO REMOVAL
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.
DANCING WITH GHOSTS
An ofrenda, or family altar shrine, at a Day Of The Dead celebration in Phoenix, Nov. 2, 2023.
By MICHAEL PERKINS
THERE ARE STILL SIZABLE STRETCHES OF AMERICA for which Dia De Los Meuertos, or the Day Of The Dead, remains a cultural asterisk, in contrast with those regions where it is sacred, mournful and celebratory, all at once. For a quarter century, I have lived in such a region, as the Valley of the Sun, or metro Phoenix, Arizona, is pretty much ground zero for the beautiful commemoration of family and spirituality that occurs in Hispanic neighborhoods each November 1st and 2nd. Catholics can specifically relate to the same calendar dates, as they coincide with the historic holidays of All Saints and All Souls Days. Also, scholars will remind us that Halloween, or the Eve Of All Hallows, which directly precedes November, was originally a time for dressing up as one’s patron saint. And therein lies the best connection to Dia De Los Muertos.
This year, I was invited to a DDLM festival held, where else?…in a cemetery, hosting a spectacular array of ofrendas, or the miniature altar-like shrines dedicated to departed members of one’s family. Precious photographs and votive candles are the main features, which are quickly expanded to include personal mementos of the dear ones, as well as endless sprays of bright pastel paper flowers, radiantly patterned hanging pennants, and, at this particular gathering, lots and lots of food. The dead are summoned by the endless skeletal figurines and sugar skulls that festoon every inch of every offrenda, and many of the celebrants themselves sport skull faces created with both mask and makeup. The atmosphere is never one of grief alone, but sadness alloyed with joy, as well as gratitude for the memories left us by our most beloved.
Dance and song narrow the gap between the “realities” of life and death.
Obviously the supernaturally tinged flavor of DDLM is paradise for a photographer, and I find myself trying to do justice to the sweetly spooky vibe by making images that are beyond mere documentation. It’s challenging to try to optically suggest a feeling, but it’s also rewarding when something unexpected makes it into the camera. This year, in using a lateral fisheye to twist the concept of space and thus suggest a kind of dream state, I also had to get comfortable with a bit of blur or distortion, as if I were able to capture ghosts in mid-dance, rendering the vanished visible, if even for a moment.
As Shakespeare said, there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in our philosophy, and seeing so many people in one place taking so much solace in re-connecting to those who have gone before creates a tremendous, electrical release of energy. Trying to make images of something that floats tantalizingly between life and death is an adventure I can’t resist.
RE-FOCUS, AD INFINITUM
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.
WE’LL TAKE A CUP OF KINDNESS YET
By MICHAEL PERKINS
IT’S A TIME OF LIFE FOR DECIDING WHAT TO KEEP, and what to leave behind. Photographers, as well as people in general, reach an age when lists must be made. The essentials versus the disposable. The legacies versus the litter. We know we can’t take it with us when we go, but now things are getting serious, and so we can’t even take everything with us as we, say, move across town. Boxes are searched: offers are made. Do you want this? If so, take it. If not…
A year ago, this mug would never have made it into the keeper pile. I have often forgotten, over the years, that I even owned it, as it was one of those awkward gifts that an adult child gets from his aging mother simply because she has already bought him everything he actually wanted over a lifetime, and, oh, hell, here comes another Occasion. It’s kitschy and not my taste and was never on my radar as an object of desire. But a year ago, my mother was still alive, and so, now, it’s something quite different.
Now, the mug is bound up in things bigger than itself, having become a reminder that she loved that I loved that we were Irish. I was the one in my generation who “got it”, who thought that remembering our family’s journey from the Great Famine of the 1840’s to the present day was important, even an obsession, and so she wished up a token of that pride and sent it to me. I thought of you when I saw this.
And so, at this point, I make pictures of the mug, in an attempt to show a bit of the feelings that shape it in my mind beyond its mere physical reality. To interpret it as an aspiration, a remembrance, a ghostly vapor. Because my mother’s passing has not rendered the actual object any more valuable or artistic of and by itself. I am really taking pictures of myself from the inside out and draping that photographic veil onto the mug. In future, as the lists of keep/toss candidates pile higher and higher, the actual cup might well be left behind, but now that’s all right. In a photograph, I can continue to have something after I no longer possess it. That’s the miracle of a camera, and the best way to remember a woman who believed in, and often brought about, miracles of her own.
ONE LAYER AWAY
For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then, face to face. Now, I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known. 1 Corinthians 13:12
By MICHAEL PERKINS
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.
CANYON-ADJACENT
By MICHAEL PERKINS
MANY LARGE CITIES BOAST ENORMOUS STRETCHES OF ULTRA-TALL GLASS AND STEEL TOWERS arranged in a kind of urban forest that is both broad and long. Think Manhattan, where the dense bigness of the skyline seems to stretch outward to all points of the compass at once, a town of big shoulders where all the short shoulders seem to have been crowded out, and where the amazingly new seems to nearly eclipse the old.
That idea of a solid, omni-directional bigness is not as universally true on the opposite coast, where, in many parts of Los Angeles, for example, the town’s bigness is often confined to buildings right along the main drags, with shorter, older residential neighborhoods intact, almost invisible, just a few blocks either side of that, as if the skyline went dramatically from dominoes to sugar cubes within a very brief distance. This is quite pronounced in the “museum row” or “miracle mile” section of Wilshire Boulevard, which begins in Santa Monica near the coast and makes its way northeast to the heart of downtown L.A.
Hidden from view in the busier parts of Wilshire, and yet scarcely a hundred yards north or south of it, dozens of older districts can be found, boasting huge homes that, in some cases, date clear back to the 1920’s, largely unchanged by all the monstrous stacks of stories that line the main avenue. They are not part of the “concrete canyon”, but are indeed “canyon adjacent”. In this frame, a vintage house can stand in stark contrast to the skyward reach of its taller neighbor, almost as if the skyscrapers provide a buffer or protective wall that acts as a barrier against the encroachment of time. The average height of a structure can thus drop from dozens of floors to two, or even one, within the space of a city block.
Neighborhoods are delicate things, and it’s always a delight to see how well some of them manage to defy change, or, more precisely, to survive it, living on to assert their own identity. Los Angeles is not unique in its array of canyon-adjacent jewels, but it is one of my favorite photographic hunting grounds because of the phenomenon.
EITHER/ OR / EITHER
Inniswood Gardens, Westerville, Ohio, color original, 2023
By MICHAEL PERKINS
I GREW UP DURING THE MASSIVE CONSUMER SHIFT that saw most photographers, both amateur and pro, fully embrace color film, giving it real market dominance over black and white. The wind-up to the change took most of the first half of the twentieth century, given the substantial barriers that blocked quality reproduction of color in both processing and printing, problems that kept giants like Ansel Adams openly disdaining brightly saturated hues in favor of a range of tones that either seemed more objective and documentary, or at least more manageable. Color remained, until the 1950’s, the devil you don’t know, and mono was so dominant until after WWII that several boomer kids seriously asked their parents if the world was actually in black and white until well after they were born.
I was not unique at the time in that the first rolls of film I shot were Kodak Verichrome Pan. It was plentiful, everyone processed it cheaply, and newspapers and magazines still defaulted to it to a great degree. I only made the leap to Ektachrome reversal film after my father graduated prints to slides and I came to regard color as more “realistic” while gradually demoting mono to inferior status. It wasn’t until well after my teenage daughter began using Ilford roll film in a 70’s-vintage Minolta that I truly began to value the accumulated legacy of b&w, adopting Edward Steichen, Walker Evans, Margaret Bourke-White and others as honorary godparents and re-learning how less could actually be more.
Mono conversion of above image.
Today, I create about 20% of my shots as mono originals, although I am strongly drawn to convert most b&ws from color masters, giving myself the most options possible. The shots that begin as mono are more numerous now because in-camera pre-sets are increasingly able to simulate the tonal range and contrast of mono films, and are therefore nuanced enough that nothing seems “lost” in the absence of color. However, I still have a few hundred mental debates per year on instances where either version might be considered satisfactory, depending on your intent and mood. Some of those debates I settle: the rest are slapped back and forth like a lazy tennis volley on slow, rainy afternoons. At the very least, the ambivalence reminds me not to get complacent about when a picture’s “finished” or “good enough”, and that may actually bode well for what I’ll shoot tomorrow.
GETTING INTO IN
By MICHAEL PERKINS
AS MORE AND MORE PHOTOGRAPHERS DIP THEIR TOE into full-frame sensors for the first time, a slight re-learning curve seems inevitable. The smaller sensors that were typical on the first DSLRs taught us all to do a strange math when sizing up shots, since a cropped image was smaller by one-and-a-half times or even more than those taken on a traditional 35mm frame. This meant that some lenses shot tighter on our cameras, with, for example, a 35mm delivering a frame more like a 50 in terms of the area covered. In moving to full-frame, the process is reversed, with a 35 shooting just as wide as a 35 should, forcing us to re-think how much info we want in wide shots that suddenly seem like wiiiiide shots.
Glad as I am to have a lot more breathing room in my images, I am still being reminded that, on a really wide shot, I seem now to be very far from the center of action. Shooting mostly with primes rather than zooms, I have to take several trial shots until I hit the right balance, and, in many cases, move a lot closer to my subject. I’ve got to get further into in.
This shot of a freight train rolling through Ventura, California was shot on a 28mm lens on a full-frame Nikon Z5. I began sizing up the composition when the engine was quite far off, taking trial shots as it first emerged from under the trestle bridge seen at far left and just ahead of a local gate crossing. I was certain that my first shots would be just about perfect, but again and again I saw the train appear distant and small. I was still framing based on my old experience of seeing a 28 on a cropped-sensor, which would read roughly like a 42mm. In the end, I had to move nearer the crossing and stand so close to the tracks that my wife became alarmed, if the phrase “you’re going to get yourself killed!!” is any indication of her mood. Even so, the train seems like it’s still approaching me, not about to run over me.
Bottom line: my brain was/is still re-learning just how much a wide-angle can exaggerate the distances from front-to-back in a shot. I could, of course, have shot the scene with a zoom, but for the fact that the zoom I had with me was nowhere near as efficient in the rapidly fading sunset light, and that the bridge camera it was designed for had a significantly smaller sensor, which would become extremely noisy with even a modest boost in ISO. Far easier in the long run to adjust where I’d stand than fussing with all those other variables. I shot wide-open at f/2.8, kept the ISO to around 100, and snagged an acceptable shot. Wide-angles are a glorious tool, but in switching to full-frame, there is a break-in period as your brain resets on the rules of engagement.
MEET ME AT OUR USUAL
Joint redux: Ventura, California’s favorite “joint”, the Star Lounge.
By MICHAEL PERKINS
I RECENTLY READ WHAT MIGHT BE, in tavern terms, public notice of a wake of sorts, advertising the partial return of a favorite local hangout that winked out during the darker days of The Plague, capping twenty years of a generally fine stretch as an Irish pub in the main streets of Tempe, Arizona. I say “partial return” because said hangout will not be returning to its original address, but will be merely a seasonal “pop-up” within the nearby Arizona State arena district, with a small commemorative bar and fixtures from the old site on display, pulled out of storage for some strange museum effect, or, to my mind, a kind of open casket viewing. Think relics of the Titanic with a liquor license. Not exactly warm and cozy.
I have, over a lifetime, availed myself plentifully of bars, but I am nearly religious in my zealotry for what are often called “joints”. The word is elusive in its precise meaning, and we can have many a beery dispute about what qualifies this or that place for the title. Suffice it to say, however, that most joints are also bars, but many bars fail utterly at being joints. It’s a term of endearment, one which must almost always be earned.
Right this way…
The fine establishment you see here, the Star Lounge in downtown Ventura, California, meets my very subjective criteria for a joint, and indeed is specifically known as one to the locals. As a photographic subject, you can see that it offers tons in what could loosely be called “atmosphere”. It is weathered without being seedy, unpretentious without being subtle. It’s comfy as an old bedroom slipper but still slick and busy and boisterous around the edges. Chain restaurants break their necks trying to make their mass-produced watering holes pass the joint test, and most of them come no closer than a TGIF or a Chili’s. Bars they may be; joints they most certainly are not.
I love taking images of places that have earned their slot in permanent cities, as opposed to strip malls. Joints are community assets, gathering places where great ideas are argued, great songs are sung (mostly loudly) and great reunions and occasions are arranged. In short, they are more than the sum of the accumulated furniture, which is why they can’t be replicated by merely showing off a few fixtures. Joints, in a way that a photographer can truly love, aren’t pop-ups.
They’re stick-arounds.
thenormaleye 