IN CHARGE OF THE MAGIC
By MICHAEL PERKINS
YOU FEEL IT THE FIRST TIME YOUR GRANDCHILD HAS TO HELP YOU access an app or activate a new toy, that uneasy fear that you are falling behind the latest technological wave….that the bus is leaving the terminal, and you ain’t on it. And of course, you, along with everyone else, tend to interpret such apprehension as a direct by-product of “aging”, but, is it really? Experience would seem to prove that, whatever our stage in life, we are estranged or intimidated by all kinds of processes or inventions; the only real issue is whether we merely use the magic without understanding it (turn the switch on and the gadget just works) or, by our level of engagement, actively pair our own energy with the magic, actively partnering with it.
I believe that’s the reason the technical end of photography has continued to hold its central appeal to me over a lifetime, not only because I apprehend, at least in general, how it works, but also because I see a part for myself in helping make it work. The media analyst Marshall Mcluhan famously said that all media were extensions of the human body. The wheel was an extension of the foot; the loudspeaker was an extension of the ear; and the camera was an extension of the eye. Photography is a mechanical process that is initiated only after an impression or idea is formed in the mind and eye. Its recording capacity is deaf and dumb until a concept propels and shapes it. Its interpretive process is completely non-existent except at the service of the eye’s guidance. Even the most automatic, “intuitive” cameras, such as those in cellphones, can never be set on full “automatic”. The computer has the means to be easily programmed, but the program itself, the code that is written between the shooter’s ears, must be supplied first.
There are many places in which my connection to tech is that of a user only, a relationship in which the magic arrives fully formed and I merely consume it. Snap on a light, open up the water tap. But with a camera in my hand, I am in a collaboration. Neither the tech nor I have the means to reach our ends without the other. That makes the workings of a lens and shutter sacred to me, since they are the pens I write with, the crayons I draw with, the extensions of myself. Nothing is automatic, and nothing is guaranteed, except that I am always in charge of the magic.
NEVER SAY ALWAYS SAY NEVER
A texture and feel beyond the real: An iPhone snap rendered through the Love 81 film emulator within the Hipstamatic app.
By MICHAEL PERKINS
TALKING ABOUT “TRENDS” IN PHOTOGRAPHY, AS IF THEY SIGNIFY ANYTHING, is like standing near the ocean and commenting on individual waves, as if any one of them will be the standard for all waves forever going forward. More than any other of the graphic arts, picture-making is not so much a strict canon of laws but a seismic measure of our most mercurial moods in a given moment.
As an example, as of this writing (May 2023, in case you wind up reading this in archive), it seems that there has been a recent turn away from the realism of formal photography, once again swinging the pendulum toward apps and software that deliberately muck up precision, processes that celebrate flaws (even artificially created ones), rip pictures free of specific time-era “looks” and otherwise make them sloppier or more random in their result. We are, at the moment, looking for the total effect of an image, including everything that is formally “wrong” about it. Maybe because there is something wrong about it.
The iPhone-bred Hipstamatic alternative to a “serious” picture of the same scene I had taken with my “real” camera.
I am looking at this phenomenon through somewhat fresher eyes these days, even though I have been a long-time user of the ubiquitous and long-running Hipstamatic platform, which has been offering lo-fi tweaks to shooters almost since the dawn of the cell phone era. Problem is, the uneven, customized look of the pictures I created with it have often been categorized in my brain as “something I just do for fun with my phone” versus making “actual” pictures with my “real” cameras. The result was that, over the past ten years, I built up an enormous folder of orphan Hipstamatic images, pictures that I seldom shared and almost never published because I regarded them as cheats, gimmicks, or “just screwing around”….in other words, unworthy of consideration in the same arena as the product of, say, a DSLR.
Which is to say that I have wasted a lot of time trying to arbitrarily disqualify a lot of photos that, upon recent review, really ain’t so bad.
The specific “film” emulator within Hipstamatic that I prefer, a filter effect called Love 81, has emerged over all others as having the proper blend of weathered texture, selective focus, and hyper-saturation that looks both like specific eras or none at all, depending on how it’s applied. And I guess that’s its big strength; the ability to make certain shots come unstuck in time, or to at least suggest times that are unavailable to those of us anchored in the present. Sometimes, like any process, it can ruin what began as a basically okay image, and, also like any process, it can’t make a great picture out of a lousy one. Thing is, our present era is really the best era ever, a world in which photographers can permanently float between disciplines, blithely floating from Never to Always and back to Never at our whim. What could be more human, and more like a photograph?
FEEL LIKE MEXICAN?
By MICHAEL PERKINS
I NEVER GOT TO SEE the titanic floating pig that wafted over stadiums for the Pink Floyd Animals tour. And my only in-person glimpse of the Macy’s Thanksgiving Parade uber-balloons was at street level, the year a horrific wind storm necessitated yanking Underdog and Bullwinkle almost as low as the tops of city busses. Let’s just say that my overall resume on epically inflated beasties is, to be kind, thin.
But, hey, I’ll always have the ginormous Pastel Burro.
That is, at least as long as a local Phoenix restaurant touts its Cinco De Mayo celebrations by mounting this oversized donkey, resplendent in its delightful dumbness, alongside Cactus Road in Paradise Valley.
Hi, burro. Long time admirer, first-time shooter.
Once I finally decided to park roadside and take a crack at it, I figured a dreamy art lens like the Lensbaby Velvet 56 would render it properly. Too weird to be real, too wonderful to be fake.
Maybe I’ll drop in for a quick fish taco.
It pays to advertise.
MAGICAL (PHOTOGRAPHIC) THINKING
By MICHAEL PERKINS
HOLLYWOOD LOVES STILL CAMERAS, exploiting them for dramatic impact in thousands of films over the first one hundred years of the movies. Entire plots hinge on the ability of protagonists, from intrepid reporters to dogged private eyes, to save the day or solve the mystery with a judicious snap, images that spring up in the eleventh-hour of a murder case or point to the tough truths in a medical inquiry. Seems Our Hero (or Heroine) is always on hand with some photographic device that ties the story together and brings it in for a successful landing, ofttimes making his/her camera a key player in the story. Magical thinking regarding photography is a part of the collective movie myth.
HBO’s recent (and successful) re-boot of the old Perry Mason series is the latest case of a camera becoming a key agent of action in a teleplay, spawning scads of on-line theories about the make, model and performing properties of the sleuth/attorney’s chosen kit. The candidate with the most votes so far looks to be the Kodak Vollenda, a compact folding model (see original ad, above) created by German optical wunderkind and former Zeiss employee August Nagel in 1929 and marketed in the U.S. after he entered into a co-operative deal with Kodak in 1931, the year before the Mason stories are set. The early versions of the camera produced images of roughly 1.25 x 1.62 inches, each taking up half a frame on 127 roll film, giving the shooter better bang for his film buck in terms of picture count but also limiting the size of its negatives, and, in turn, how sharp enlargements (for those climactic courtroom scenes) could be. For your average superstar lawyer shooting a lot of medium and long shots in natural light (or even darkness) with a maximum aperture of f/3/5, this could spell trouble, at least if you were counting on the results for critical evidence. Hooray for Hollywood.
The Vollenda in Perry Mason’s era would probably have fed on the old Verichrome Pan film, with a not-too-aggressive ASA (or ISO) of 125…again, pretty good in brightly lit situations, but not so great when skulking around dark alleys or spying on suspects misbehaving across nightlit streets. But, ah, well, the thing looks amazing in actor Matthew Rhys’ hands, and is historically consistent with the period, despite the fact that its original $33.50 list price would equate to well over $600 in today’s currency, a bit steep for a down-on-his-luck gumshoe in the middle of the Great Depression. But, ah, well, as Billy Shakes often said, the play’s the thing, and Hollywood’s greatest photographic illusion is in selling us all the fantasy of a super camera that save the day by the end of the final fadeout.
Cut.
Print it.
THE FACTUAL / ACTUAL FAULTLINE
Back When The Browns Lived On Main, 2022
By MICHAEL PERKINS
I RECALL A 1972 INTERVIEW WITH A PROMINENT ROCK CRITIC in which he confessed that, three years into the new decade, he was just getting used to the idea that the 1960’s were “going to end”. Not the idea that they were already over. No, he was even wrestling with the concept that they would ever be so. Such is the plastic quality of our sense of time. In some moments, it seems like the things we’re living through will continue forever, while, at other times, it seems like everything, everywhere, is already past. This yo-yo-ing sensation plays hell with our emotions, and, in turn, with the pictures we attempt to create with transient subjects. At least, that’s what happens with mine.
One situation which gets my own internal yo-yo spinning involves making images of small-towns life, which always sets me careening between the sensation that I’m both experiencing something that’s truly eternal and, simultaneously, something that’s as gone as the dodo. Standing on the simple main streets and leafy, sleepy lanes of the villages and burgs that have so far outlasted the twentieth century, it’s easy to be assimilated into the place’s slower rhythms, to briefly be lulled into thinking that it’s really the rest of the world that is imaginary. But then there is the rude shock of walking past a 1940’s drug store, complete with lunch counter and soda fountain, and bumping into a place that repairs iPhones. For a second, nothing makes sense. The two “realities” do, of course, co-exist; however, we are aware that the relics of the earlier era have essentially overstayed their welcome. They are living on borrowed time, the same borrowed time we, as photographers must now use wisely before….before…..
The surreality of shooting in small towns dictates the look of my pictures of them. I tend to use exaggerated tonal ranges, soft, painterly looks and dreamy art lenses on them, rather than merely recording them with the sharpness and balanced exposure of mere documents. As their very actualness is now so fluid in my mind, I prefer to see them as in a dim vision or imperfect remembrance. They seem more poignant for being less fixed in our regular way of seeing.
Like the 70’s reporter that couldn’t imagine his “time” ever coming to a close, I wrestle with the task of depicting worlds that are rapidly receding into the realm of memory. Oddly, making them look less literal bolsters their reality to me. For, like that reporter, I can’t imagine that they are ever going to end, and that dictates how I tell my camera to see. At that point, the machine, the instrument, is as unreliable a narrator as my own memory, just as it’s also made more reliable to my heart.
SOMETHING’S LOST, BUT SOMETHING’S GAINED
By MICHAEL PERKINS
AGAINST MY BETTER JUDGEMENT, I OFTEN SUCCUMB to the allure of those endless Facebook memes which pose a mathematical conundrum, i.e., “6 + 10 x 4- 3 – 8 x 3 x 3=? or some such other brain torture. I always labor long and sincerely over the solution, and I am always, always wrong. Instead of spending the rest of my declining years admitting that, sorry, numerical concepts are not my forte, and going my way in peace, I instead keep returning to the scene of the beating and begging for yet another blow.
(This is the part where I attempt to make a tenuous connection to photography. Don’t blink or you’ll miss it..
So here’s my pitch; when it comes to the process of making pictures, I love the endless process of addition and subtraction, the ongoing calculation of where, in an image, information needs to be either included or eliminated. Half my process in composing is spent in determining what size the frame should be, and the other half is deciding what deserves to make the cut within that box. Many other aspects the making of the image, from exposure to the whole color/mono choice, or even subject selection is colored by the initial decision about what will or won’t earn its bit of real estate within a picture.
If the right choices are made, then what I call the Joni Mitchell Balance (i.e., “something’s lost, but something’s gained”) will be struck in such a way as to maximize the impact of the photo. Or not. Sometimes you have to settle for Close, since Totally There is off the menu. Take these two shots as an example. The subject was originally mastered in color (see top), and deliberately under-exposed to quiet the effect of color in comparison with the the three figures on the right. Turns out that even the minimal hues I got were still too distracting, and so I converted to mono (directly above), since I felt that the trio, albeit with a great deal of non-defined detail, were the real stars of the picture. meaning that anything that did more than force the eye in their direction was expendable. I remember hearing the old western classic “Ghost Riders In The Sky” as I snapped the frame, and the idea of figures who destinations or aims would forever be shrouded in mystery appealed to me.
Like those blamed Facebook add/subtract/multiply/divide exercises, the picture required careful calculation and re-calculation. However, photography is much more forgiving than math, and so, at least when making pictures, I will never have to settle for the assertion that there is but one single correct answer to the problem. It’s an admittedly sloppier way to see the universe, but (brace yourself, now) it adds up, at least for me.
NEITHER HEAVEN NOR HORROR
By MICHAEL PERKINS
DEPENDING ON WHO YOU ASK, ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE is either a miraculous boon or an existential threat to mankind, seen by some camps as an opportunity to evolve in untold ways and by others as the fast track to enslavement. As pertains to the arts, a quick scan of current press clippings yields mega-scads of hair-on-fire warnings that all creative pursuits, photography among them, will soon be usurped by Our Machine Overlords. Why, the reasoning goes, should anyone put up with fussy and imperfect human artists when the Frankenstein Brains can be just as creative?
This image, in particular, has recently scared the Bellowing Bejesus out of photogs the world over. As of this writing (April 2023, for you archive hounds), its creator, Boris Eldagsen, has just won the Sony World Photography Awards competition with it. He has also thrown a rock into the pond of public discussion by refusing said prize, explaining that he cannot accept it since the picture was generated by A.I. instead of a camera. Suddenly “someday” has been shoved right into our “present-day” faces, given the image’s compelling realism as well as its nostalgic evocation of an earlier “photographic” processes. If anything can convincingly suggest the look of a photograph, Eldagsen’s entry certainly does. To make it, he typed a series of cues and conditions into a program which produced the results in mere minutes in what Boris refers to as a “promptograph”. “You start from your imagination, and you describe what you would like to have”, he said of the process in a recent interview with NPR, “and you can make such a text prompt quite complicated.” Like many people viewing the results, Eldagsen is both delighted and terrified by the results:
As an artist, I love AI. (But) as a citizen of a democratic country, I’m shocked about the possibilities of disinformation it gives. Anyone that can just type a couple of words can create a photorealistic image of the Pope in Balenciaga. You can’t trust an image anymore. We need some kind of labeling – some kind of fact-checking where you see that an image has gone through certain instances – has been getting proof by photo editors. Only then we can know it’s an authentic picture – shows something that has happened.
What’s been missing from all the panicky reaction seems to be the plain fact that photography has always, always lived at the juncture of pure light recording, technological manipulation, and the artist’s vision. Photographs are a group effort, never devoid of whatever tweaking and “post” is out there at the moment or the raw act of freezing time but always in the service of an artist who decides what the mix should eventually be. Every change in recording medium, technical gear, enhancement or format has been initially met with, at best, disdain, and, at worst, outright outrage. But just as photography never supplanted painting, A.I. imaging merely needs to be labeled and marketed for what it is, neither heaven nor horror, but merely another way to tell a story. If you love the mechanics and science of a camera-rendered image, stay in that lane. If you want to see what else is out there, trust the story you’re telling more than the language you choose to tell it. Given the advance of photography over its first two centuries, “Promptographs” have no clear advantage over conventional picture making; both require a thinking mind as their initial spark.
WITHIN THE WITHIN
Wide lenses can capture a lot of data. Sometimes too much.
By MICHAEL PERKINS
A FULL YEAR AFTER SWITCHING FROM CROP SENSORS TO FULL-FRAME SENSORS, I am still getting my bearings on some elements of composition, at least as I had grown used to them. To greatly over-simplify, the focal length of my lenses has, for more than ten years, been magnified by about 1.5x, so that, for example, a 35mm lens would “read” on a crop sensor as a 50mm. That determined what I’d would or wouldn’t see in the frame, with the biggest cramping occurring in wide-angle shots, where I live about half of the time.
The result was that my mid-70’s 24mm, a real- go-to for me, was actually delivering the aspect of a 35mm; still wide, but not really panoramic. This was no big deal, since I got used to composing and cropping for what my camera was seeing and shot accordingly, as we all do. The real difference is being felt now, when my 28mm on a full-frame is really 28mm, meaning that a whole lot more…..stuff is being included in my wide shots than before, stuff that I must police much more stringently than I might have done in the past.
Take a look at the shot up top, taken inside a stable, empty except for a single horse. There is so much space within the frame, all chock-full of equipment, gravel (so much gravel) and other atmospheric elements that the purpose of the shot, right out of the camera, can easily be interpreted to be, aww…the poor horse is all alone in this huge building, as if that’s the “message” of the picture. Now, from my vantage point, I could not have framed any tighter; my location was dictated by barriers that held me back at quite a distance. And, since I’m shooting with a prime lens, I can’t zoom, so all compositional control defaults to how I will crop later.
The horse, not where he lives, is the real story.
Turns out that it takes very little extra space around the horse to sell the idea that he’s “all alone”, so I can easily cut stalls, hay bales, and other filler off on both sides and still easily convey his “solitude”. But here’s the deal; once I started cropping, I began to observe a different story emerging in the picture, since now I was actually seeing the small arm that’s coming in from the right to pet the horse. Now the image is about He’s Not Alone, that, in fact, someone cares about him enough to stop and offer a bit of tenderness.
Wide-angle shots can sometimes keep us from getting into our pictures, and, if we change the way that we see what we shoot, such as the revision of “what is a frame” that I’ve been dealing with recently, our viewpoint can be modified in subtle ways. Shooting wide is a great tool, but only if we reserve the option, upon further thought, to think narrow as well.
THE KEEPER OF THE LIST
By MICHAEL PERKINS
IN ALL THE YEARS I HAVE WATCHED HER PRESIDE over hundreds of both seasoned and starter birdwatchers in the Arizona desert, I can’t recall ever having seen Andree Tardy without her signature We Are Serious About This Stuff sunhat and her loose khaki fatigues. Chances are that if I were ever to bump into her in “civvies” at the local Safeway, I might easily pass her without notice, even though, by now, she has served for years as our group’s go-to Earth Mother, an empirical and encyclopedic source of information on Which Birds Breed With Who, how their plumage changes with the seasons, why the immatures are less resplendent than the adults, and how you can distinguish a “Too-Whit-To-Whoo” from a “Wit-Wit-Wit-Too-Too”. Because she is just that good.
“Okay, did anyone see any vermillion flycatchers?”
I mention Andree’s all-season costume because, for us, it is inextricable from her physical form, the “plumage” by which we identify her “behaviors”. Tough as a turtle’s toenail and consumed with a passion that defies the damage of time, she is, at 81, hardier than many of the sex-and-septuagenarians that trail behind her like lost chicks. That bottomless supply of energy is fed by an insatiable hunger to know more, to see what’s around yet another corner, and the corner after that. I have shot dozens of candids of her over the past twenty years, but I find that minimal images of her in full birders’ regalia registers even higher than a mere facial portrait. She just is the sumtotal of all her outer contours. from her fingerless gloves (easier to work binoculars with) to the billowy slacks that protect her from the scars and scrapes of desert plants to the headgear that all but obscures the aquiline angularity of her face. I can’t imagine making a picture of just her face. It would somehow seem incomplete, like Schweitzer without a pith helmet or Superman without the cape.
The other object that is constantly with her is only withdrawn at the end of bird walks, but is as crucial as every other component in her makeup: The List. Andree’s lifetime role as teacher, interpreter, guide and dauntless ornithological doyenne demands that, at the end of the day’s spotting, she, and she alone call out the categories and species, the better to officially tally the count of what, to a certainly, was actually seen. She knows she can count on us all to honorably report our individual sightings; after all, birding, unlike fishing or hunting, is a system built on honor, along with a proper Hippocratic pimch of “do no harm”. Anyone can teach someone else about birds, but The Lady Herself also teaches respect, humility, responsibility. The birds, and all who choose to watch them alongside her, could not be in better hands.
THE DEVIL’S IN…
BY MICHAEL PERKINS
A GAME OF INCHES
By MICHAEL PERKINS
TO BEGIN WITH, EVER SINCE THE INSTANT I TOOK THIS PICTURE, I have wondered if I had the right to.
The all-invading eye of the camera should be tempered at times by our awareness that it allows us to look in places that perhaps should remain beyond our discovery….that, having seen a thing via these miraculous machines, we cannot ever un-see them. This feeling has accompanied the most recent images I’ve made of my parents, both now in their nineties, both unsteadily Pulling Into The Station, so to speak. Their every day is a high-wire act that vibrates between desire and risk, between the drive to do what they once did so effortlessly and the daunting dilemma posed by trying to do, well, anything. They are playing a reverse game of inches.
I want to stop what time is still left. I want to lean on the camera’s reliable value as a recorder. I want just. one. more. memory. And yet, in chronicling the ever-tougher track of their days, I am aware that no single frame will convey what I’m seeing, or can ever sum up a near century of living, striving, failing, loving, dreaming. And so I keep making pictures, pictures that will always come up short, even as they are increasingly precious.
I can often feel as if I’m violating a trust, making these images.
The one you see here is of a very ordinary thing; my father, at ninety-three, doing his weekly physical therapy session. He needs it to shore up his strength, protect his muscles against atrophy, improve his balance. Beyond that, he needs for his body to have something achievable to reach for, just as his still-acute mind is still stretching to embrace ever-new concepts and projects. His focus in these sessions is determined, but not angry; he knows how much has been taken from him and my mother, but his emphasis is not on regret, but instead on squeezing the juice of opportunity out of every instant of time he has left to him. Me, I have to force myself to photograph this all as dispassionately as I can, since it’s me, not him, that is mad, that indulges in self-pity. But that’s my parents; gaping into the chasm, they are still turning back toward me, the everlasting upstart student, as if to say, watch carefully; this is how it’s done.
This morning, driving around my neighborhood and mentally sketching a layout for this post, I asked Siri to play a song that, for me, has gained additional poignancy over my lifetime, Carly Simon’s “Anticipation”, knowing full well that I would be sobbing by the end of it. Still, in the context of where I and my parents are at the moment, I also knew it would leave me feeling, in some amazing way, grateful for its wisdom:
And tomorrow we might not be togetherI’m no prophet and I don’t know nature’s waysSo I’ll try and see into your eyes right nowAnd stay right here ’cause these are the good old days
THE RIGHT-HAND BRACKET
By MICHAEL PERKINS
SOME OF THE MOST HISTORICALLY ESSENTIAL IMAGES from photography’s first decades were created without much public awareness of their authors, as many of the art’s earliest practictioners labored unsung and uncelebrated. In painting, drawing, poetry or literature, tracing the creators of the great works of the 1800’s has proven far easier than crediting those who made the first world’s first immortal photographs. The feeling that the world could, should be documented far preceded the notion that individual voices in that historical work should receive their due.
In some ways, the American Civil War served as the launchpad for the first photographers to be personally recognized and marketed as a “brand”. At the beginning of the conflict, only Matthew Brady, who operated the first true professional studio out of New York, was anything like a household name to the general public, with the illuminati of the Victorian age beating a path to his door for their moment of immortality. Once war broke out, Brady exported his fame by dispatching several wagons of mobile darkrooms across the country, documenting the North/South carnage in a way that had never before been attempted anywhere on earth.
It was inevitable that at least a few members of the army whose war images were universally credited as “photo by Brady” would aspire to emerge from their anonymity, and one of the first such to succeed in going solo was Alexander Gardner, a Scottish immigrant who, like Brady, had initially distinguished himself chiefly as a portraitist. In one of history’s great in-your-lap twists, Gardner landed one of the grimmest photographic assignments of the 19th Century when, at the war’s end, he was chosen to create portraits of the conspirators who had aided John Wilkes Booth in murdering Abraham Lincoln.
Visiting the prisoners (including Lewis Powell, above) in their cells, Gardner snapped images that can strike the modern viewer as remarkably informal and candid, even contemporary in their aspect. And then, within days, he suddenly reverted back to his wartime role as a pure chronicler, assigned to document the plotters’ executions. His before-and-after series of the hangings, gruesome as they were, were also, for a grieving nation bent on revenge, in high demand, marketed on post cards, magazine covers, photo-derived lithographs and even glass slides for magic lantern projectors. Matthew Brady may well have provided the left-hand bookend for a national tragedy, but Alexander Gardner provided the right-hand one. And in between those brackets, the art of photography was changed forever.
OUT OF HIS SLEEVE
By MICHAEL PERKINS
THE TRUEST TEST OF ANY GREAT ART is endurance over time. We’re not talking the mere ability of the work to survive physically, through preservation or curation; just managing to not crumble into dust is not a major accomplishment. No, the real proof lies in the time-travel property of art’s intention or vision, the ease with which it leap-frogs eras to give new audiences a glimpse of what sparked its original creation. Things last because they continue to relate.
In my personal case, one of the joys of photography has been in trying to use my own limited powers of interpretation to view lasting works of art and try to see something fresh in even the most famous among them. One of my chief targets in this joyrney is the work of Frank Lloyd Wright, designs that continue to turn a fresh face to each succeeding generation and thus invite re-evaluation.
This is especially true of Wright’s lesser-known projects, some created in his ’90’s, when he told Mike Wallace that, however many more years he might live, he could just “keep shaking them out of my shirtsleeve.” Indeed, at his death in 1959, dozens of his designs remained unbuilt, such as this side court on a church whose blueprints were purchased from the Wright Foundation by a Phoenix congregation decades after his passing. Unlike his superstar signature pieces, this quiet structure has not been photographed to death, allowing both viewer and shooter a fairly blank slate on which to inscribe whatever impressions they choose.
Art bounds across time to delight us anew because we find our own age’s reasons for loving it. Photography is a vital tool in this quest to see established works from a new angle, in a new light, offering fresh messages.
THE WOMAN WITH THE WALKING STICK
By MICHAEL PERKINS
IF “LIFE” IS DEFINED AS THE STUFF THAT HAPPENS while you’re making plans, Photography can be said to be comprised of the pictures that emerge while you’re planning other pictures. We have all begun setting up what we hope will be the ideal frame when something from just offstage screams, “hey, look over here.” Success and failure, then, are often measured by how insistent them strange little voices can be.
In the astringent desert vistas of Arizona’s Tonto National Forest, merely the shock of color generated by a late-winter “superbloom” of Mexican poppies would normally be all the visual fuel needed for a luscious landscape. And, just ahead of this shot, things certainly started out that way.
And then I saw Her.
Just a solo woman with a walking stick. Just one small figure with a determined stride, separating from the roadside throngs of thrilled snappers wading through the golden waves of flowers and striking out on her own to head….where? Her actual destination was unimportant; more importantly, her very position in my viewfinder had given an “okay” scene a stronger central axis.
Walking along a wire fence, she reinforced its receding line, pulling the viewer’s eye into the picture and toward her. Her separation from the parallel highway and the distant mountains established scale. And finally, showing a scattered field of poppies provided more contrast and texture than the unbroken blankets of them available just across the road.
Start with one plan, shift gently to a slightly different one. Think them both through and make a deliberate choice. In an art that strives to be less about taking pictures and more about making them, challenging your first instincts is a habit worth cultivating.
TEST (OR MOEBIUS) STRIP
BY MICHAEL PERKINS
SOME IMAGES ARE THE FINAL DESTINATION for a concept, while others are only the launch pad for one. For most of its first century, photography was, at least for non-professionals, a sort of “straight out of the camera” proposition. You calculated, aimed and clicked, and what you got was, for all intents and purposes, your final product. Sweetening and manipulation was for the elite.
Now, tech has conferred the gift of boundless tweakery on everyone, meaning that a photo is not “done” unless we are completely through fiddling with it. Artistically speaking, this removes all barriers to, or alibis for, unsatisfactory results. It’s both empowering and intimidating, as it means that photogs, and not cruel fate, are ultimately responsible for the final version of a picture.
Witness the steps in the gestation of a photo that many of us already see as a somewhat average process:
The image seen here began life as a phone snap of the ceiling understructure inside a mall that had been stripped to the bones ahead of a restoration. After the initial snap, I cropped out the lower retail storefronts, leaving me with a mere patterns of girders and supports. I then coverted it to mono, ran it through an app that created a mirror image of one half of the pattern, and finally used a “mini-planet” platform that transformed it into a spiral. And I still may not be finished.
The sheer giddy joy of having this amount of freedom is far more important than what I myself choose to do with it. The main takeaway is that, for all photographers everywhere, the training wheels are truly off the bike. It’s an amazing time.
SECOND SIGHT
By MICHAEL PERKINS
FOR ME, ONE PREDICTABLE TAKEAWAY FROM THE RECENT PLAGUE YEARS has been a forced re-ordering of my priorities and pleasures as a photographer. Quite simply, the conditions imposed by a need for caution and patience have not only made me see differently, they have altered what it is that I look for in the first place. Any time you change the number of places you can go, or reduce the total number of things you can get near enough to photograph, your pictures will automatically be re-shaped.
In my own case, the isolation imposed by The Great Hibernation moved me about three feet forward as a bird watcher.
My wife and I had already been settling into the division of labor seen in many birding couples, in which one partner spots ’em and the other shoots ’em. This is totally logical since I am not even ready for the Rank Amateur Semi-finals when it comes to identification, and makes even more sense since Marian would rather experience the birds in the moment, through binoculars, than worry about “capturing” them. The result is that I learn how to slow down and learn something before I shoot, and she gets the souvenirs at the end of the day. Happiness all around.
A checked box on my wife’s birding “life list”; a flock of Cedar Waxwings convenes in Tempe, Arizona, 2023
This year afforded us an exercise in patience that, frankly, I might have muffed just a while ago, in that we spent weeks searching for the same avian pot of gold, with lots of frustration and near misses along the way. Colder, wetter winter weather in the higher altitudes of Arizona had created a shortfall of food for several species, forcing them down into the massive deep bowl in which the Phoenix metro sits. This in turn created a surge of one of Marian’s “life list” birds, those special rare sightings that birders truly live for. That bird, the cedar waxwing, was suddenly popping up in massive flocks everywhere, usually in the company of a throng of robins, who are no great shakes in many parts of the country, but are fairly rare around here. The affinity of the two species for each other meant that if you saw a single one of either bird, chances are you were near a major gathering of both. The hunt was on.
I relate this tale to reaffirm that, in The Before Times, I was just peripherally aware of birds, in that they were something I occasionally photographed but seldom had as my primary focus. The intervening years have changed all that, something I realized when, at the point we happened upon a motherlode of waxwings and robins surging into a local pocket park, I not only felt I had accomplished something photographically, but also that I had experienced real, unalloyed joy. My wife and her friends had finally had me in their classroom long enough to get my attention. And while I will probably never have the discipline to become a great wildlife photographer, at least I know, now, what I could be missing. And that’s a gift beyond measure.
DISSOLVE TO…..
By MICHAEL PERKINS
The world is too much with us. —Shakespeare
NO OFFENSE TO THE BARD, but, as a photographer, I find that the world, far from being “too much with us”, is perpetually dissolving, slipping away, fading into memory. That very impermanence is, of course, also one of the things that makes photographs precious, in that we are constantly documenting places that will eventually rot, burn, or fall down. And now, from the ever-loftier perch of my dotage, I can call up fat catalogues of the sites of many crucial aspects of my life, from schools to workplaces and beyond, that simply are no longer in the physical world. This change is both expected and shocking. We reluctantly accept that the old tower where you were an eager office boy must fall to the wreaking ball, but when even Notre Dame catches on fire, you realize that reality itself is standing on a banana peel.
One day’s reality is the next day’s “where did it all go?”
In these columns, we often lament not merely the pictures that were made “wrong”, but, more importantly, the ones that were never made at all. Even with the crushing daily input of millions of images made possible by the digital revolution, we still miss shots, and, with them, the chance to preserve memory. With thousands of clicks in our shutter counts, we still finish every day slapping ourselves for the one thing we meant to snap but didn’t. This is made trickier by the fact that we lull ourselves into believing that all the things we’ve always been around will, you you know, always be around.
Which all goes back to the master maxim: Shoot It Now.
Many of us have places that shaped us in some way that we’d love to tour just once more before they are condemned or collapsed into ash. Sometimes we make the pilgrimage; sometimes we are too late. Often, sadly, a thing is gone long before our artist’s eye will have formed a fitting way to pay homage to it. The business of photography is thus a high-wire act between salvage and loss, a yin/yang struggle that can never be resolved. Our art represents both our gratitude at saving some things and our regret at not being able to save it all.
FREE RANGE
Wild Mustangs graze in an eastern section of Arizona’s Tonto National Forest.
By MICHAEL PERKINS
HUMANS, ALL TOO OFTEN, ARE PATHETICALLY INEPT AT VIEWING THE NATURAL WORLD through any lens of experience outside their own. We define things as being relevant or irrelevant relative only to our own needs, operating under the idea that the whole works is somehow put here for us. The wider universe of breathing, thriving, feeling things only becomes visible when it crosses over into the realm of our wants, our concerns. We are predictably, often fatally, clueless about life except as it pertains to us; we act as if someone left us in charge.
Obviously, this affects the kind of photographs we make of our interaction with nature. But seeing nature only on our terms shapes the images that we seek, providing only a narrow frame of reference. How to make a picture of something that we barely apprehend? How to capture the essence of a thing that strikes us as exotic, even alien?
Acting yesterday on a tip as to the whereabouts of a sizable herd of wild mustangs in the part of the Tonto National Forest near Fountain Hills, Arizona, I found myself, like all the other travelers pulling off to the side of the Old Bush Highway, struggling to apprehend the existence of a horse stripped of any connection with man. These gorgeous animals would never know the sting of a bit between their teeth, never wince from the pain of a branding iron, never labor under the weight of a rider or the cinched constriction of a saddle. That is, they would live their entire life as horses among other horses, with no thought of any other life or task beyond just being a horse. They looked like the “nature” we thought we had seen a thousand times, and yet they lived in a world defined by their priorities, not ours.
Guides in the area were on constant alert to make sure that we gawkers maintained a respectful distance, lest our presence violate the terms of the very special audience we were being granted, with most of the horses within fifty feet from their visitors. Some interpreted this as a way to safeguard our safety, but I chose to believe that it was they who needed protection from us. Our smells and sounds; our energy, our intrusive humanness. For one of the only times in our lives, we were in the presence of something innocent, something raw, unrefined. Unmolested. The wise thing was to remind ourselves that we were guests, not masters, awed children, not cowboys. Here was a chance to slow down and learn something.
Taking pictures of the natural world is never a single, simple thing. Many of the problems we have created for this tired old planet stem from the fact that we are increasingly estranged from most of the beings that we share the Earth with. Too often, we spurn true partnership between our realities and those of other creatures. How can our cameras be trained to tell the truth when we still know so little of what that truth looks like?
A SENSE OF PLACE
A strait-laced institution dictates a straitlaced, technically simple interpretation.
By MICHAEL PERKINS
WHENEVER I MAKE A PICTURE OF A BUILDING, any building, I have an intention in mind for it, a definite way I want it to be presented, and so am faced with much the same choices I might exercise in the making of a portrait. My choice of exposure or composition has to be deliberately designed, as that is where all comment on the building’s age, features, provenance, or context is based. This means that every time I shoot a site, there has to be an active discussion in my head on every aspect of lighting, texture, color. Buildings, for me, are never mere background. Indeed, properly seen, they often speak louder than the people passing in front of them.
One of the biggest decisions in this process is how photographically representational I want to present the structure. Sharp lenses, for example, convey a kind of straightforward, documentarian approach. Brick looks like brick. Reflections in windows are simple, without capturing stray information from neighboring activity. Colors are natural. Definition is clear and clinical. That’s one way to show the building, and choosing that way means purposefully choosing the glass I’ll use to shoot it.
A former robber baron’s estate, now a historical park, may be better seen with a softer lens.
Recently, I have also re-acquainted myself with the look of soft or selective focus lenses, which takes the depiction of buildings in a much gauzier, vague, even whimsical direction. You can make a place seem as if it’s part of a recurring dream. You can boost contrast and efface small details. The result strikes some as “anti-real” but, since buildings store memories as well as people and furniture, we are already imparting surreal qualities to them as they surface from our collective subconscious. Both optical approaches have their virtues.
In the top image, the college building is captured in the way we suppose that we actually see, in something of an “official” view that might comfortably adorn the school’s brochures. In the lower shot, a building nearly as old as the college is softened deliberately to evoke the fairy-castle quality that an old mansion from the early 1900’s conveys to the modern visitor. Under our gaze, the “use” of such a structure invites personal interpretation, since, as a modern-day city park, its old, specific use as a personal mansion has become unmoored. Liberated from its old associations, we are free to assign new ones, and to make images that reflect that flexibility.
Camera technology has expanded over the centuries to facilitate choice, because people are always struggling to reflect new ways of seeing. If your gear tells your story, you are one lucky kid. If it doesn’t, then it doesn’t matter a damn how accurate, or expensive, or highly rated it is. It’s a pen in your hand. Make it write the light the way you want.
TOO MUCH OF NOTHING, AND VICE VERSA
By MICHAEL PERKINS
IT WOULD BE FAIR TO ASSUME THAT MOST DEFINITIONS OF PHOTOGRAPHIC COMPOSITION refer to the total arrangement of space between objects, as well as the selection of what goes into, or stays out of, the frame. This can include objects like furniture or people, even intangibles like weather, but, for the most part, what we mean when we say a shot is well composed means that the final assignment of things within the frame is either balanced or busy, correctly directing the eye to things that are compelling and steering it away from items that are extraneous. The word “composition”, then, tends to be, primarily, a thing-based term.
I would argue, however, that the consideration of value and tone is every bit as vital a consideration as where the scenery is placed. Certainly the photographer must make solid calls on where a tree or a mountain or a left-right parameter figures in a shot, but key decisions in the use of color, contrast or overall exposure are also a kind of composing. In sound terms, for example, the sheer inventory of items in a photographic frame is roughly akin to the notes on a piece of sheet music the composer decides what the total number of notes will be on the page, and whether that arrangement is sparse or dense. However, the art of “composing” requires a second dimension; the values assigned to said notes, from near-silence to fortissimo; the rests; the attacks; even what orchestrators call “color”. The same thing holds true in a photograph.
Once I have agreed what the dispersal of, let’s say, the props within a shot is to be, I still have to direct the eye in terms of how it will weigh the importance of those items in relation to each other. In the case of the above image, the choice of monochrome and a relatively high-key exposure attempts to do that. This in turn leads to other decision: for example, is the texture of every single brick important here? The grain of the stucco buildings in the background? Do I need to adjust shadows so that more information is revealed within them? In other words, the picture’s composition is affected by every choice made in its making, not merely what makes it into the frame from top to bottom or left to right. Even without cropping, I can “de-select” certain visual data, or give clues as to its relative importance. That all just goes to whatever singular formula it takes to make a picture “work.” Bob Dylan wrote of the maddening power of a life defined by “too much of nothing”, but, without either changing “something” in a picture to “nothing”, or vice versa, we are, in effect, saying that all things in the frame are equal, and, artistically speaking, we know that just isn’t true.
thenormaleye 