YOUR BRAIN IS STILL THE BOSS
A first draft, shot on full auto: f/2.8, 1/125sec., 28mm, ISO 640
BY MICHAEL PERKINS
AT THIS WRITING THERE IS A BLIZZARD OF EDITORIAL CONTENT hitting the news services about the imminent arrival of artificial intelligence, which, according to your viewpoint, is either going to save humanity from itself or speed its obsolescence or a combination of both. Visions of 2001’s Hal 9000 setting plans to replace or murder us are making headlines and causing heartburn across all public sectors. Such trembly dispatches might seem novel to many, but, for photographers, the issue of whether we or our machines are to be the decision makers has been a regular grappling match for decades.
Technology often proceeds ahead of any true appreciation of its real benefits or risks; just ask a planet whose air was being fouled by automobiles for decades before we even started to ask, “do we really need this?” As to photography, ever since the first basic autofocus systems were introduced, cameras have steadily introduced dozens of additional features that are designed to anticipate what we will want in a picture so that it can be provided for us without our direct input. There is no reversing this trend, but the best photographers labor to keep all of it on a short leash, or, more to the point, to keep asking the question Who’s In Charge Here?
Caution: major use of quotation marks ahead.
When a camera shoots on automated modes (even partial ones like Aperture or Shutter Priority), it endeavors to create a “perfect” or “balanced” or “correct” exposure, making its best “guess” as to what you might want. But who is defining these terms, and how can they be appropriate for all the moods and motives that travel through the shooter’s mind? At best they are merely a point of departure, leading at times to, yes, a really great image that captures exactly what we imagined. At worst, they empower a device to assume what we want, creating a picture that it “reasons” will please us. This is the certain road to a tsunami of “good enough” pictures, a vast mountain of mediocrity.
Same subject on full manual: f/3.5, 1/250 sec., 28mm, ISO 400.
In the top image, I responded to a sudden opportunity by shooting on full auto. Now, the result is perfectly okay, in that the exposure is balanced and the range of color values is, how you say in the English, “realistic”, but I feel that the second image, shot on full manual and designed to selectively illuminate some areas while deliberately underexposing others, is closer to how I see the shot. But how can I fault the camera? It, at least, is working up to its full design capacity. In telling it to shoot on full auto, it’s actually me that is abdicating my responsibility for how well the picture works/fails. Camera users have long dealt with the challenges that the population at large is just now facing with A.I., and our advice is: keep your own intelligence in the driver’s seat; something can’t assist you when it’s actually instructed to ignore you.
OF EASTER EGGS AND SURPRISE JOYS
By MICHAEL PERKINS
PHOTOGRAPHS CANNOT TRULY BE MADE AT THE SPEED OF WHIM, but, in the busiest shooting environments, it can certainly feel that way. In the digital era, we click off bursts within bursts, racking up frames at a rate that was prohibitively expensive for all but the most monied among us back in the film days. This means that, even as we shoot more and more in less and less time, we have to force ourselves, in the editing process, to slow ourselves back down, lest we miss a shot. Not a shot we neglected to grab in the moment, but a shot that we failed to notice in reviewing our work in haste.
It’s really common for me to fire off a fussilade of exposures on something that I fear I may not have long to work on, and completely miss the fact that, even in a wave of so-called “wasted” shots, I was accidentally blessed with a little Easter egg that, upon more deliberative consideration, gave me something I didn’t even realize had been snagged at the time. It’s the surprise joy of finding out that you accidentally did something right for a change, even when it’s a something that you weren’t actually going for.
Run For It, 2023
The tree you see here is, for a variety of reasons, one of my favorites ever. It’s also within a mile of my house, and so I have literally unlimited access to it whenever the fancy strikes me. On the occasion of this shot, I was trying to show the unique sweep of its branches (which are far demonstrably dramatic in monochrome), giving the impression that the tree is swept up in a windstorm even when the weather is dead calm. What you see here is one of about six frames I cranked out in rapid succession. My first review of the shoot being too hasty, I rejected all of the images I got, going back for a different angle on a different day, convinced that the earlier day was a washout.
About a week passed before I had enough time to pore over the first sequence with any real patience, and that’s when I saw them; a sizable flock of starlings which, just an instant before the snap, had apparently been completely hidden in the tree’s canopy, and which, during this one exposure, were spooked into flight. There was no sign of them whatever in the shots either immediately before or after this one, making the moment uniquely alive with movement in a way that static images of the tree had failed to be. And yet, the shot might have lay forever unnoticed in a large general folder of pictures, had I not allowed it to reveal itself by slowing my roll and paying as much attention to the aftermath of the photograph as to its birth.
SELF-LEGENDS
By MICHAEL PERKINS
Let me kick my credentials.
Ice-T, Back On The Block
A HUNDRED YEARS AGO, THE WORD WAS “BALLYHOO“, a term for the most salient trait of Americans; self-promotion, the proud and loud announcement that we are here. Ballyhoo has assumed many forms, being at once proclamations about who we are; statements of who we hope to be; agendas for what we want you to think; claims about what we have to sell or bargain with; reminders about how much respect we demand; warnings about our boundaries; rules of engagement, for good or ill.
“Self-legending”, and how it makes its way into our every visual communication, is perhaps the most American of American qualities. We didn’t single-handedly invent mass communication or advertising, but we certainly promoted and perfected the fine art of ballyhoo in ways that are still modeled the world over. Photographs of our urban landscape are a blur of our various brags, boasts, promises, and promotions, along with the hard truth that, like it or not, you must deal with us. Americans are almost fatally allergic to being ignored, and so, simply announcing is never as good as shouting through a megaphone, or, in graphic terms, making the colors bolder and the letters bigger. We visually bellow at each other like barkers in a carnival or competing vendors in a street market.
In making their enduring images of life in this country in the twentieth century, masters like Robert Frank and Walker Evans often shot frames that were almost completely composed of signage. Today, those time freezes are a valuable resource for marking what our priorities were in bygone eras; the various announcements of merchandise, company names and prices anchor the pictures in specific dreams of specific times. Nearly one hundred years on, we use different tools to, in Ice-T’s phrase, “kick our credentials”, but the same urgent need to be noticed, to be heeded, goes on, albeit in new guises. I can never photographically take the measure of a city without trying to contrast old and new signage, original inscriptions and names along with the newest refits from a Starbucks or a McDonald’s. Photography is the first art in the history of the world that is equal parts reportage and interpretation, and trying to learn how to see humanity amidst all the ballyhoo will always make for legendary pictures.
FIFTY SHADES OF VANILLA
By MICHAEL PERKINS
THE DAWN OF DIGITAL PHOTOGRAPHY SO COMPLETELY CHANGED so many equations in the art of picture-making that it would take the rest of this calendar year to even take a stab at comprehensively listing them. Such an enormous roster would certainly include ease of operation, speed, enhanced learning, increased control, and a universe of choices and options. However, for me, it when I’m working in color that I realize that most of the effects that, years ago, were the exclusive products of the rich and well-equipped (call them the “darkroom generation”) are now at our fingertips at a whim. If the democratization of photography can be said to have begun with the first modestly-priced, more easily operated “everyman” cameras around 1900, digital process has certainly given all of us the power to deliver any look, any personal “reality” if you like, in any circumstances.
Color shows off this power this most effectively because we no longer are limited to a primary or official rendition of a hue, such as was the case in the earliest days of mass-appeal photo publications. Anyone who wanted to tweak a red to a magenta, for example, had to make very deliberate preparation before the shutter snap or complicated intervention after it (or both) to get that particular value. Now, a child can do it in a short series of clicks. Even the spectrographic presence of all colors, resulting (in light terms) in “white” is now subject to an infinite number of variants. Egg shell? Vanilla Ice Cream? Snow? Forget about being able to control all the other colors of the rainbow; plain old white is a complete spectrum unto itself.
White balance, for decades a difficult and frustrating calculation, is now completely automated on even the cheapest cameras, adjustable to tons of variants with a mere twist of a knob. Going even further, apps by the zillions allow for white to recall any atmosphere or mood with incredible ease and speed. In the two pictures of a mobius-strip-like stage canopy shown here, the top is rendered in “daylight auto” white-balance in the camera’s manual mode, while the lower shot, taken mere seconds later, required nothing more than clicking the mode wheel to “U2”, where I’ve stored the settings required to instantly render a fairly good replica of the warmer tones of Kodachrome film. Both of the canopies can rightly be called “white” by the brain, and yet there is a lot of wiggle room in delivering what might best be termed “white according to whom?”. For those of use long enough in the tooth to remember how laborious this all used to be, it’s a miracle.
Photography was once the domain of magicians and wizards, practicing dark and unknowable arts in shadowy, secret places. There were the limited play spaces that we, the general public inhabited, and then there was their separate, mystical realm. Now everything’s out in the open, and, once again, technology has dissolved the barriers between the tinkerers and the artists, giving us all a shot at playing the same game. It’s a lot more fun this way.
VITAL SIGNS
By MICHAEL PERKINS
ANYONE LUCKY ENOUGH TO TAP INTO THE NATURAL PAIRING BETWEEN PHOTOGRAPHY and birdwatching will be humbled by observing the raw courage of winged creatures to survive despite humanity’s best efforts to the contrary. Even in rural settings, one cannot help but be struck by the numbing crush of obstacles mankind has left for the natural world to stumble over; how our habitat is so tilted in our own heedless favor that nature must live, not with us, but in spite of us.
Within cities, the horror is even greater, as our life crowds out any and everything that does not directly redound to our needs. In such tableaux, it is incumbent on the photographer to become a journalist, a chronicler of what needs to happen if we are to carry on sharing the planet with, well, anything. And, as an amateur birdwatcher, I am reminded by what bad earth citizens we have always been when my eye is drawn to what, to my mind, is one of the most elegant and misunderstood birds in our nature: the starling.
Introduced forcibly to North America in 1890 by a fanatical Shakespeare aficionado from Britain, who believed that his new home should feature literally every species of bird mentioned in the Bard’s works, the first stateside starlings originally numbered only about one hundred birds in all. Predictably, those have since become millions, earning not praise for the bird’s adaptability and intelligence, but scorn from those who regard them as invasive pests or worse. These gorgeous creatures, whose plumage, in the changing light of the full day, literally contains the rainbow, have made the best of their fate over the centuries, much like any other erstwhile immigrant. Sadly, they are often hunted and hated as if they themselves had decided to invade our shores just for the fun of it. And so it goes with scores of other creature; untold species of animals, plants and birds have been forcibly introduced onto the continent by the most predatory pests ever unleashed on the planet; humans.
Starlings are plentiful nearly everywhere, but the intense sunlight of the American southwest can highlight their hues in spectacular fashion, something I never would have slowed down to notice were it not for the birding buddies my wife has generously shared with me. My initial interest was boosted in intensity during Lockdown, mainly because being outside was one of the only essentially safe ways to pass the time, speeding up my bird learning curve a bit (although I am still barely able to hobble along in the “beginner” division). It has produced a kind of evangelism in me, and I can never again see a bird without wondering to what extent my fellow humans have complicated or compromised its existence. If we can muster shame about anything, it should be our hideous habit, going back over our entire history as a species, of fouling our own nests.
I GOT THEM OL’ DIGITAL TOLLBOOTH BLOOZ
By MICHAEL PERKINS
I HAVE CARPED PREVIOUSLY (AND MAY WELL AGAIN) over the fact that cell phone photo apps are, at once, a spark for creative manipulation and, ironically, the kiss of death for pictorial quality. Fer shur, apps giveth the chance to carry a photo lab, with all its flexibility and instant gratification, in your pocket, and that’s truly exciting. However, the same apps also taketh away sharpness, contrast and nuance. Oh, you wanted both a work of art and an image that’s visually conherent? Good luck with that.
Digital platforms provide quick sharing for any work, but there is a price tag. Once a picture leaves its original domain, which in for the sake of argument, let’s say, is the cell phone that created it, mischief begins. The main toll your image must pony up on its way to an app, from Instagram to Twitter to thousands of others, is compression, which removes data from the original in order to squeeeeeeze it along on its virtual way. Problem is, the same toll is collected again when the app sends the modified file back to Facebook, Reddit, and so forth, and collected at least a third time if the result is so compelling that you elect to share it back out to other apps or friends. The result is like the old office memo that was Xeroxed from a Xerox of a Xerox. In other woids, gobbidge.
When Time Itself Exploded (2017)
Let’s look at a test case: in the above image, the master shot was of an ornate Art Deo-era door grate which I snapped via phone in a museum. The original was sent to the Hipstamatic app for color modification and contrast adjustment. That second version was then shoved through Tiny Planet Pro to produce the spiraling effect, then shared back to my Phone, then sent out to Facebook, and back from there to this platform, WordPress. The final result was a bit like starting out a race with a thoroughbred horse and limping across the Finish line with a legless hamster.
One of the more obvious by-products of all this bouncing and slicing is that the color shift in the image is violently out of control, as if the blank wall that originally served as the photo’s background has been replaced by a psychedelic lab slide of angry protozoa. If that was what I had been going for, mission accomplished. Photography is rife with works that were deliberately degraded for effect. But here, all my choices have been degraded without my permish, leaving me totally at the mercy of whatever penalty the various apps have exacted in order to perform their various parlour tricks. Someday this may no longer be the case; however, for the time being, it’s a pricey tradeoff for the photographer. I made something that made you want to see, but I hate how it looks.
SOOC / SOOB
By MICHAEL PERKINS
AFTER ALL THESE YEARS, ONE OF THE ONLY TIMES THAT I SHOOT AT FULL AUTO, that is, literally just pointing and delegating all of my upper brain functions to the camera, is when a brand-new lens comes into my life. Because just as I love the romance behind the idea of SOOC (or “straight out of the camera”, a state I aspire to but seldom attain), I also flirt with the concept that automatic focusing and exposure systems might eventually progress to the point where I could concentrate on nothing more than subject and composition. This second ideal I call shooting “SOOB”, or Straight Outta The Box. It’s a little like hoping that the four millionth horse you see in a corral will somehow, also, be a unicorn. And just as likely.
I admit it; I’m incurably curious about what a fresh piece of kit will do simply by being snapped in place and turned on, and I will usually spend a few days or even weeks after a new purchase taking a near hands-off approach to shooting with it. I know that technology is inching ever closer to intelligent machines that can nearly, nearly second-guess my intentions, that operate with their own pseudo-intuition. And yet, after this honeymoon period, I predictably revert back to my personal comfort zone, which is shooting on nearly 100% manual settings, minus the occasional crutching on auto-focus. Why is this?
Another new lens, another try at full auto shooting. Certainly acceptable, but I still feel the need to intervene…
It’s just a fact that a significant number of photographers the world over are perfectly fine with letting their cameras make nearly every exposure decision for them (as in the fully automatic exposure seen here), with millions more at least clicking on full auto and fixing the faults later, either in-camera or with software or apps. Most importantly, the manufacturers of cell phone cameras have staked their amazing success on making their devices sweat the details of making a picture so that users can sweat it that much less. The trend line over time in camera tech has always run toward easier execution, with each succeeding generation of features making it more and more tempting to let the camera assume greater control, all with the promise of better results.
But better according to whom? There is a line, in the minds of many photographers, between removing technical obstacles to acting on your picture-making instincts and relying on the tech to, in effect, execute those instincts for you without your active participation. SOOC still means that you are personally shaping your decisions, as best you can, ahead of the click, trying to get things so right that modifications after the fact can be minimal. SOOB, at least for me, is asking me to relinquish all creative control because a device can maybe guess what I would have wanted anyway, and I’m not ready to go there yet. Like anything else in this racket, it’s a matter of degree, a game of inches. But those inches matter more than anything in the pictures that emerges from the process.
CHEWSING
By MICHAEL PERKINS
IN THE UNLIKELY EVENT THAT I AM EVER REINCARNATED, perhaps I would live my best (next) life as a cow. At least that’s my gut feeling. No, I mean, literally my gut, since, like my bovine brothers and sisters, I am a ruminant. I regurgitate and re-chew my existential cud endlessly, obsessively masticating my life to extract every bit of anxiety from my every choice. I overthink my options the way Elsie and Elmer worry a wad of pasture grass.
And that is why it is so amazing that I should be a photographer at all.
Making pictures is one of the only things I do almost purely by instinct. Examine any other enterprise in which I’ve been involved, from cooking to business matters to philosophy, and you’ll observe a consistent pattern of slow, deliberate development, with few bursts of pure fancy or whim. Photography is something else. To be sure, capturing a image does take at least a modicum of advance strategy; however, in the final snap of the shutter, there is a bit of a leap of faith, a commitment that moves you past the knowledge that This Might Not Work Out. And oddly, for an over-a-chewer like myself, the ability to finally let go and click is not terrifying, but thrilling, a moment of pure abandon that, for me, is truly exotic, almost drug-like. It allows me to do things that cannot be precisely nailed down before they are tried, as in the case of this image, which is clearly not the result of lengthy over-thinking.
That’s why my “favorite” picture must always be the one I’m just about to make. I get such a dopamine hit off being able to release my anxieties in the creative process that I hunger desperately for the next high. And the next one. And the next one. In so many other aspects of our lives, we can more easily talk ourselves out of doing something than into doing it. We learn to approach almost any choice as if reading a risk-benefit assessment. That’s why there are never nearly enough astronauts or mountain climbers or novelists among us; the risk of failure….worse, of being judged a failure by others, is too daunting. But in the creative sphere, we seem to give ourselves a hall pass; this one time, you can be bold. This one moment, you can just not care whether it’s perfect.
This why I hate for the camera to be elevated to the status of a magically autonomous instrument, or a perfect machine. Photography is so much more than the technical execution of a recording. It is not a mechanical seismograph but an emotional one, and so making pictures has to be done by chewing less and swallowing more. It simply must be done with the emotions in the driver’s seat.
ALL TOGETHER, NOW
By MICHAEL PERKINS
OVER THE YEARS, The Normal Eye has posted articles that, in place of my own random meanderings, are composed of collections of quotations from the photographers who speak to us with their words as well as their images….not to “explain” any one frame, but to describe what commonly motivates us all about the process of picture-making. Many of these masters new and old convey many of the same passions and pursuits we all share, and their thoughts are usually offered here as a mere roster of stand-alone quotes. Simple.
However, over time, so many of these artists have crossed into the same areas that I wondered how to demonstrate just how much that all have in common, and so, for today, my seventy-first birthday, I thought I’d try to patch several of the best together to form a kind of photographic TedTalk that might easily have come from a single mind. After each separate quote, you’ll see a number which you can reference at the end of the post for attribution of that portion. So “picture” an anonymous interviewer posing the simple question, “tell me about your approach to photography” and getting an answer like..
All photographs are accurate. None of them is the truth.1 A good photograph is one that communicates a fact, touches the heart, and leaves the viewer a changed person for having seen it. It is, in a word, effective.2 Photography is about finding out what can happen in the frame. When you put four edges around some facts, you change those facts.3 There is a creative fraction of a second when you are taking a picture. Your eye must see a composition or an expression that life itself offers you, and you must know, with intuition, when to click the camera. That is the moment the photographer is creative. 4 One should really use the camera as though tomorrow you’d be stricken blind. 5 Since I’m inarticulate, I express myself with images.6 The whole point of taking pictures is so that you don’t have to explain things with words.7 One doesn’t stop seeing. One doesn’t stop framing. It doesn’t turn off and turn on. It’s on all the time. 8 Of course, there will always be those who look only at technique, who ask ‘how’, while others of a more curious nature will ask ‘why’. Personally, I have always preferred inspiration to information. 9 If a photographer cares about the people before the lens and is compassionate, much is given. It is the photographer, not the camera, that is the instrument. 10 It is more important to click with people than to click the shutter. 11 Great photography is about depth of feeling, not depth of field. 12 To consult the rules of composition before making a picture is a little like consulting the law of gravity before going for a walk. 13 When words become unclear, I shall focus with photographs. When images become inadequate, I shall be content with silence. 14
My birthdays have all been graced with images that effectively arrested time in their flight, capturing not only light, but passion, adventure, curiosity, and, occasionally, truth. The people who made them have given that eternal birthday present to me. Every day of every year, I get to shred the wrapping paper on a fresh treasure. And laugh, like a delighted child.
Key to quotes
1. Richard Avedon. 2. Irvin Penn 3. Garry Winogrand. 4.Henri Cartier-Bresson. 5. Dorothea Lange. 6.Helen Levitt. 7.Elliott Erwitt. 8. Annie Leibovitz. 9. Man Ray. 10. Eve Arnold. 11. Alfred Eisenstadt. 12. Peter Adams. 13. Edward Weston.
HOW LITTLE IS TOO MUCH?
By MICHAEL PERKINS
ROGER PRICE, THE CO-CREATOR OF MAD LIBS, the most popular party game on earth, was, ahead of all those famously incomplete one-page narratives, the best-selling cartoonist behind a slim volume entitled Droodles, a series of simple scribbles whose economy of line was the “set-up” of a joke, the punch line being supplied by the accompanying comic captions. The fun was in trying to decide what the picture was “about” before Price supplied the answer. One of his best is seen above, named Ship Arriving Too Late To Save A Drowning Witch. You get the idea.
Price inadvertently (or was it advertently?) demonstrated a skill essential for truly communicative photography, a talent I call Knowing What To Throw Out. It’s been my experience that, absent a few geniuses, most of us shoot too much. Not in the number of exposures we click off, but in the overload of visual information that we allow to remain in the final product. Recomposing and amplifying such shots with the most fundamental of tools, mere cropping, is an exercise in learning the answer to a nagging and constant question; in a picture, how little is too much?
In my case, one of the most revelatory exercises in reviewing old photo files is discovering that many frames I had initially written off as “failed” actually contained smaller sections within the overall image that would be perfectly strong if a major portion of the original were to hit the cutting room floor. Sometimes, of course, this method only reveals that, sharp, ruthless knife or no, there’s really no strong story in the picture at all, no matter how you slice it or pare it down. So it goes.
In the master shot of this multi-textured house, several strong structural elements have potential. The stucco, tile, wrought iron, masonry, fabric, wood, and glass all collide in a building that, overall, has a certain visual appeal. But, in cropping, we find that the closest intersection of all of these elements is where the compositional set point actually occurs. All the shot’s other visual information serves as nothing more than a distraction, since we really don’t need the entire structure to convey the idea of “house”. The various textures work best when they actively compete for attention, and a tight crop shows every flavor of a charming edifice with no fat and no fillers. As in Price’s cartoon, we don’t need to show the entire ocean around the rescue ship, or convey all of the back two-thirds of the vessel. Nor do we need to show the entire drowning witch; the hat is enough.
“Doing more with less” is such a hackneyed phrase that you can get shame arthritis in your fingers just typing it on the page. But pore over some of your own “almost” images sometime and see what happens. You may find that, imbedded within some of your most maddening misses, there lies a hit or two.
WHAT WOULD WHO DO, AND HOW DA YA KNOW?
By MICHAEL PERKINS
LIKE ALL PHOTOGRAPHERS, I am more or less the sum-total of the various artists who have influenced me over a lifetime. This doesn’t mean that I intentionally emulate anyone in particular (at least not consciously), but occasionally, I will notice that this or that shot suggests an approach that resembles one that’s traceable to one Grand Master or other. For example, after seeing and shooting the above storefront, it occurred to me that the classic street shooter Walker Evans might have chosen such a subject: a mad mix of cultural objects, signage and cluttered detail. On sharing this idea with a friend, I was informed that “Evans, of course, would never shoot it in color”. The remark reminded me that, while Evans’ work was, indeed, primarily in black and white, there is no reason that he’d specifically shoot it that way today, right here, right now.
In glorifying particular artists who worked primarily in one mode, we can easily make the mistake in assuming that certain quotes we cite from them on the subject were the way they always felt, every day, every second of their life, and, of course, that is absurd. In the case of Walker Evans, it may be a historical fact that the bulk of his work from the 30’s through the ’70’s, much of it simply documentary in nature, is in mono. However, it’s not demonstrably true that, besides a few stray comments, he universally disdained color or wouldn’t use it. In point of fact, toward the end of his life, he fell in love with the color work he was doing with a Polaroid SX-70 instant camera, and went out of his way to revise any earlier remarks he might have made about the medium being less authentic or “photographic” monochrome:
I don’t think that the doors (that are) open to falsehood through color are any greater than they are than through the manipulation of black and white. You can distort that, too. I’m not a ‘black-and-white’ man: I think grey is truer.
Evans was indisputably one of the most eloquent chroniclers of the the visceral impacts of social upheaval and challenge in the 20th-century, and he properly deserves his place in the pantheon of photographic pioneers. However, knowing more, and better, about all of his beliefs, of the full range of his work, is the best way of doing him honor. Ultimately, either in mono or in color, I think Walker would have liked this particular storefront window, as he had loved so many over his long career, simply because it was speaking in the same language as his camera, and his unerring eye.
FLOATERS
By MICHAEL PERKINS
THE TWENTIETH CENTURY CAME IN SHOUTING FOR OUR ATTENTION, born of an unprecedented urban surge and the explosive birth of mass media. Sales people often stress the importance of “always asking for the order”, but in the new emerging supercities that began sprouting after 1900, it was not so much an ask as a scream. Getting your brand noticed by any means changed the way we communicated, and, in a unique way, changed the country visually.
Billboards, which on a smaller scale had always been a part of the urban scene, became, in places like New York, Chicago, Detroit, and Los Angeles, bigger than ever before. Businesses announced themselves with giant iron rooftop structures called scaffold signs, not pasted posters, but massive neon letters that seemed to be floating in mid-air, titanic displays that could be seen from blocks away, in what were both advertisements and address cards. Today, the signage tech has evolved from gas-filled tubing to LEDs, and, while the visual noise and insistence sales pitches of cities are still very much with us, the once-grand scaffolds have, for the most part, rusted or collapsed into memory.
Los Angeles is one of the cities that have taken a proprietary interest in preserving the greatest of the survivors, and its central core, whose entertainment district once boasted at least 100 vaudeville and film theatres, remains home to some of the neon dinosaurs of the Age of Ballyhoo, many still blinking and burning bright atop its most venerated apartment buildings and legacy skyscrapers. For me, it’s a chance to capture the fleeting shadow of how American used to “get out the word” in the earliest days of the advertising age.
I occasionally stay in the Koreatown district, in a hotel that looks directly out onto one of my favorites, the rooftop sign for the Brynmoor Apartments, which still survive and still command decent rates in a midtown neighborhood that sits at the foot of the Hollywood Hills. It may be ridiculous to work as hard (or harder) to preserve a thing that advertises an historic place as to try to save the place itself, but that’s where we are right now in our history.
And while there have been moves to stick selected “floater” signs in museums or galleries, the best move is clearly to keep them intact where they were designed to be seen. In the words of a recent Los Angeles “Historic Resources Survey”:
Rooftop signs are significant for their association with the commercial growth and prosperity of Los Angeles, the development of the city in association with transportation (streetcars and automobiles), and its reputation as a center for advertising, entertainment, and recreation.
Yeah, like they said. Crank up the wattage and turn on the time machine. We got things, and people, to sell here.
STORIES WITHIN STORIES
By MICHAEL PERKINS
THE RESTORATION OF HISTORICALLY IMPORTANT HOMES is an imprecise art. The challenges range from structures that are essentially unchanged since their original use, with all effects and furnishings intact, to buildings whose shells have been salvaged but which have lost all their historically correct detail. In the latter case, those returning the homes to daily use by the public must stage the places with period-correct props, trying to augment a narrative that an empty edifice along could not provide. They act in the same way as set directors on a movie shoot, filling in gaps to, in effect, supplement a big story with a lot of little ones.
Thing is, sometimes not only the devil, but the real interest, is in such details, as with this drafting set I encountered during a recent tour of a grand old summer home built by a millionaire in the Arizona desert of the 1920’s. Nearly every original accent in the house has been artificially placed to suggest real living space, even though its first owners sold the home soon after building it. One nice little tableau in a front-facing room features a copy of the original house blueprint, laid out on a table as if its creator were still poring over it, flanked by a lovely leather-bound kit from the long-forgotten Eugene Dietzgen Company, once one of the country’s premier maker of drafting tools. And therein lies a real tale.
Travelling (and drawing) in some very important circles.
Eugene, born in Germany in 1862, was soon moved by his father to Tsarist Russia, where Papa promptly got himself in hot water for distributing socialist literature critical of the reigning government. In 1881, Joseph Dietzgen sent his son to live in America, both to evade the local military draft and to spirit away some of the writings that had already landed the old man in prison on occasion. Arriving in New York at the age of 19, Eugene Dietzgen began working for a German drafting company, and soon moved to Chicago, where he formed his own tool-making firm in 1881. Applying his father’s progressive ideas in the new world, Eugene provided such exotic amenities for his employees as individual bathrooms for men and women (!) and open window sills inside the factory decorated with flowers. He also continued to promote the writings of his father, a philosopher who counted no less than Karl Marx among his fans. Early in the 20th century, the Dietzgen company soared to the top of its field with a very popularly priced slide rule, and slid into history as the Dietzgen Corporation, which exists to this day.
So, since it wasn’t the property of this historic house’s original designer, how did this elegant kit find its way to the Arizona desert? That’s the fun of diverting one’s attention from the intended purpose of placing the object on this particular table, and using the camera to celebrate the story within the story. This object was someone’s go-to for precision work. How? As a gift? An aspirational investment in a future career? An impulse purchase? As is often the case with a photograph, the picture is a two-way door: things are concealed and revealed, all in the same instant.
WORKING UNDER (AND ON THE ) COVER
By MICHAEL PERKINS
OVER THE PAST TWO CENTURIES, MUCH OF PHOTO MANIPULATION has been akin to a magic trick, in that the creator wants to call attention to the effect rather than the technique. Indeed, photographic fakery is most often the art of not getting caught when distorting or reinventing reality. In the age of Photoshop, it has become tougher to detect where the wires are, even though more of us than ever are indulging in a little polite puppeteering. However, any historic discussion of altered images must include a man who did everything he could to let his audience in on the joke.
Advertising savant George Lois, who died in 2022 at the age of 92, saw his career peak during photography’s first true ascendancy in both marketing and advocacy. Beginning in the 1950’s, the technology for reliably printing color images coincided with the dominance of national news and art magazines,. The trend made Lois, one of the first of what are now called graphic designers, to become a superstar in his own right, developing an uncanny ability to snare eyeballs and change the cultural conversation, all the while decidedly ringing the cash register for his clients. In his snarky, satirical use of photographs in both ads and mag covers, he created national crazes and hip cocktail conversation by composing patently fake pictures with a wink to the audience that seemed to say, you know I’m doing this. These things never happened. We’re just seeing what it would look like if they had….
In nearly a hundred covers for Esquire magazine in the 1960’s, George Lois seized upon the hippest and most pivotal figures of the culture and counterculture, from Mohammed Ali to LBJ to McCarthy-era hitman Roy Cohn to Woody Allen, generating imaginative mashups of their actual images with impossible staging for editorial effect. For his Esquire covers, he cranked out fever dreams like Andy Warhol being sucked into a whirlpool inside a Campbell’s soup can (top), and Richard Nixon (whose presidential defeat in 1960 had been partly attributed to his on-camera appearance) sitting in a make-up chair getting ready for his big comeback (above). Lois, the man who had shaped campaigns for everyone from Xerox to Aunt Jemima to USA Today, and who would eventually have the world chanting, “I Want My MTV!”, delivered everything to his customers wrapped in a wry confession: Hey, we’re just selling stuff here. YOU get it, right? Instead of soap powder or toothpaste, Lois’ “product” was the editorial content inside the magazine. It seems insanely obvious now, but then, it was a revelation.
As a man who oversaw everything from concept to completion, Lois hated portrayals of his business like the Scotch-and-cigarette playboy Don Draper and all of his ilk on the Mad Men series, which made ad execs look like the driving force of the agencies instead of those who “worked full, exhausting, joyous days: pitching new business, creating ideas, “comping” them up, storyboarding them, selling them, photographing them, and directing commercials.” Years ahead of the digital revolution that now make fakery easy to conceal, Lois and his cohorts (capitalist hucksters all) showed us that the rabbit was not actually in the hat but tucked inside the table. In some very entertaining ways, he was more honest, in his swindling than many of his successors.
ADRIFT BUT NOT ALONE
By MICHAEL PERKINS
I SPENT A SIGNIFICANT STRETCH OF MY CHILDHOOD LOST. Not being lost, adrift in the existential Neverland that I often inhabit as an oldster, but getting lost, willfully banishing myself to places where I could be utterly, magnificently alone, unmoored from the constraints of community and kind. Days that began with my mother asking “where are you going?” and me automatically answering, “nowhere” are among my most marvelous memories. The fact that “nowhere” was a destination and not merely uncertainty made a difference. I respect the miraculous meaningless of not having to report to someplace, somebody, or something. It’s as close to peace as anything I’m likely to experience.
And, just as I sought for years to be going Nowhere, I cherish the opportunity to, when needed, spend the day taking pictures of Nothing.
What kind of nothing? Well, perhaps I mean anything, as in anything that comes to hand. And, along with that unplanned plan, images of people who celebrate, as I do, the value of just being, not bound anywhere, not belonging to anything, just…being. This makes me a sucker for an image like the one seen here. The original master frame was taller, and showed that, in reality, our relaxed friend was far from alone. And yet, within his immediate space (and certainly in his mind) he was as solitary as it gets, and so I cropped the shot to reflect that. Big shots often contain enough visual information for several pictures. This was one of those cases. Our Man In Red clearly had no need of the extraneous people in the scene, as he had already bought his express ticket for Nowhere. So that’s the way the photo feels now.
Of course, when you quit the society of people, you have the potential to get re-connected with Nature at large, and, in a world in which we are generally estranged from much of our environment, that in itself has become a trippy experience. We remember how to move through the woods but have forgotten how to let the woods move through us. And so, when I am shooting Nothing, I get a real ping of kinship when I behold someone who is busy being Nowhere. Because, in both photography and life, Nothing can often be Everything.
INVENTORY OF EFFECTS
By MICHAEL PERKINS
IF IT’S JANUARY (as it is at this writing, the head end of 2023), then it’s time for rifling through endless old image files for two diametrically opposed searches: one for the pictures that I hastily conferred “keeper” status on, and the other for photographs that took a bit of time to win me over. In the case of the former, many a shot that initially seemed to be a hit reveals itself as a mishap of magical thinking, or of me wanting to believe that the pictures were better than they were. This comes from mistaking good intentions for actual achievement. In the latter case, I have done just the opposite, skirting over something that didn’t hit me in the gut at first glance but now strikes me as slightly more than passable. The first search is good for humility. The second is an exercise in joy.
In reviewing the pictures that were once faves but now seem “meh” to me, I find myself searching for answers to the question, “what was I thinking?”, each answer invaluable if I have the guts to face reality. In looking at the re-discovered gems, I struggle to define the common thread that courses through all of anyone’s pictures that really, really connect with me. A few key findings emerge:
First, only a handful of them were taken with amazing, or even decent cameras. Bad tools can make picture-making trickier, but even if you’re holding a non-responsive brick in your hands, love will find a way. Secondly, even when taken on decent equipment, a surprising number of the neo-keepers are quite technically imperfect. In fact, more than a few violate even basic rules of composition, exposure, and so on. Still other newly-adored pix were shots were the product of very fast decisions: that is, if they were planned at all, they are short on reaction time and long on raw instinct. In the case of the image shown above, for example,all three of the things that I have listed as compromising factors are in evidence. The picture was taken during an aggravating day on which one of my oldest DSLRs was actively dying on me, its exhausted shutter freezing on every other frame: it is not particularly sharp, and in fact contains a few radical blowouts (some of whom have been mercifully cropped): and, finally, I had about three seconds from “maybe this would work” to “a passing car has now obliterated half the scene”. I did not literally shoot this from my hip, but I might as well have.
Strangely, the final image appeals to me more than a few others taken before and after it, pictures where the camera was, you know, actually working. I shuffled past it with a grunt upon first viewing, and yet, over a year later, I see something in it that I wish I could do more purposefully at some other time. Maybe our self-grading on the curve is like the charitable comments many a teacher has scrawled on a kid’s mediocre report card: “shows potential”. Some days, viewing one’s work in a certain way, that assessment is even better than getting straight “A”‘s.
STOLEN MOMENTS
By MICHAEL PERKINS
PHOTOGRAPHY IS JAMMED WITH MADDENING PARADOXES, conditions that can work to either promote or thwart creativity, or, insanely, do both at once. One of the more maddening of these conditions came about with the dawn of the digital age. Suddenly, the unforgiving economics of film, which had made people work slowly and deliberately (lest they click their way into the poorhouse) shifted in favor of the photographer. Now, in essence, once he bought the camera, he was virtually shooting for free, meaning, in practical terms, he could produce more images, at shorter and shorter delivery times, than had previously been possible. Good, huh?
Well, in terms of the learning curve for making good photographs, swell. Being able to shoot hundreds of shots in a fraction of the time that it used to take to crank out dozens sped that curve up dramatically. This meant that there was at least the potential to get good in a shorter stretch of time. But with those instant mega-batches of pics came a price…measured not in money or convenience, but in precision.
Simply put, shooting at the speed of instinct obliterates the careful pre-planning that film used to enforce on us. It’s an anti-contemplative way to make pictures, since the fact that we can make so many of them so quickly begs the issue of whether we should do so, or whether we might merely slow down and make fewer but better photos. Some photographers have tried to steal back those precious moments of deliberation by using simpler, more purely mechanical cameras, forcing them to pause and think before every shot, in order to compensate for a device that can’t do nearly everything by itself. Others have decided to give film another try, again to make mistakes costlier, make the results more uncertain, and thus promote a more painstaking prep for each frame.
Point That Thing Somewhere Else #354, January 2023. 1/800 sec., f/6.5, 2000mm, ISO 200.
In my own case, my recent accidental wanderings into more wildlife work, dictated by the narrowed range of safety during the pandemic, has had the extra benefit of making me take more time to shoot fewer pictures. First of all, both the focus and zoom functions on the camera used in this capture of an American kestrel are sloooow, meaning that firing multi-bursts at a rapidly moving object is just a waste of time. And beyond just having to wait on the camera to respond, choosing a moment when the bird is moving the least is another calculation that slows the decision-making process. You must simply wait for the shot to come to you rather than just firing off a fusillade of frames and hoping something works out. Presto. You’re working slower, and with more mindfulness.
When it comes to creativity, speed doesn’t necessarily kill, but in many cases there is nothing to be lost by interjecting the occasional “why am I doing this?” into the process. It takes longer, but it was that very reduced speed that accompanied many of the greatest images that were ever made, in the days before we could shoot as fast as we could press the shutter. Taking a breath sometimes resets the mind and solidifies the intention.
P.O.C. x 2
By MICHAEL PERKINS
NOSTALGIA, AS YOGI BERRA FAMOUSLY REMARKED, ain’t what it used to be. Photography often feeds on a longing for the past, either in the artificial retro-rendering of the way we used to capture images (think faux tintypes), or an affection for the actual life events we chose to preserve Back In Der Day (see every old shoebox of snaps you own). And now, in an unusual twist, Gen-Z shooters are experiencing their own time-specific manifestation of this pleasant pang, focusing on the very beginning of the digital era.
Suddenly a significant number of media influencers and Instagram mavens have turned away from cell phones as their default cameras and re-embraced the earliest days of pixelated point-and-shoots. Raiding Mom’s junk drawer for a working Canon Powershot or Kodak Easyshare, a growing number of Z-ers are seeking the lo-fi tech that accompanied many of their most important personal memories, peppering their online feeds with uploads of delightfully (and intentionally) flawed photos. So try to track this, history lovers: we have gone from film cameras to primitive digital cameras to more advanced digital cameras to remarkably advanced phone-based point-and-shoots back to primitive digital…all in the service of (sing it with me) Memories…light the corners of my mind…misty, water-color memm…...(ahem, sorry).
In some ways, this mini-trend echoes the fascination many young hipsters have long held for analog film as well as the crappy cameras that make them look even more, well, filmic, as if the technically derelict pics that emerge from them are somehow more tactile, more authentic than those from the latest iPhone or Android. And while I understand this desire to return to some Eden of lost youth, I cannot truly share the sensation.
I mean, look at this thing.
Behold my first-ever digital, a p&s from 2001 that boasted a Herculean 1.3 MP in raw, beefy picture power. For those of us who’ve forgotten the math, that’s a whopping 1280 x 960 worth of resolution, not exactly the stuff of dream enlargements or even decent screen quality, but hey, the picture’s ready right away (hear me talkin’, oh Polaroid pioneers!) Such cameras were, to the first generation of digi-users, a P.O.C. (proof of concept) that was also a P.O.C. (piece of crap). Full disclosure: my actual D-370 has long since disintegrated in my hand, meaning that I had to scan the interweb for an image of it. And yet, with such devices, say the young-un’s in the Then-Was-Better movement, I captured my prom, I chronicled our rafting trip, we giggled through Graduation Day. The remarks of one of the uber-young who are re-experiencing their salad days says expresses the sensation thus: “I feel like we’re becoming a bit too techy. To go back in time is just a great idea.”
Pardon me if I restrain my giddy joy.
I never took a technically acceptable picture with this peashooter, and I ran into the welcoming arms of my first DLSRs with unbridled optimism. Now, it could be argued that I finally can take technically acceptable pictures, but haven’t yet learned how to breathe a soul into them, but that’s a confession for another time. Some of those returning to first-gen digitals claim that the experience is one of simplifying or slowing down their picture-making, and on that count, I wish them godspeed. Whatever (and whenever) it takes to make a picture you love, from daguerreotypes to Kodachrome, you do you, and ignore all the old sods that say Don’t.
GOOD ENOUGH IS CLOSE ENOUGH?
By MICHAEL PERKINS
THE APPEAL OF PHOTOGRAPHIC PHONE APPS lies not in their efficacy or even the overall quality of their output, but in their sheer, I-just-thought-I’d-try-this convenience, the ability to immediately scratch whatever creative itch has just come over you. Given the amazing speed of even formalized editing suites from Photoshop on down, apps are thus shortcuts within shortcuts, immediate gratification for the most extremely ADD among us. And certainly there is no harm in this kind of Veruga Salt I-want-it-now impulse processing, unless, of course, you mind the substantial reduction in pictorial quality that accompanies many of them.
In the case of the symmetry design app called Flipper, seen in use here, so much compression occurs between the resolution in the iPhone master shot and the final processed shot that the picture is no longer dense enough for use as a printed image at any useful level of enlargement. Its lowered rez restricts its use to life on social media or other on-screen sharing. Shared back from the app to a site like Flickr, for example, it barely passes muster in terms of quality. Worse, importing it into Photos or similar traditional libraries causes even more compression. It’s a shame, because the very ability of apps to give the shooter editing options galore, anywhere, anytime is a potentially great benefit, but one which can create pictures that are at once creatively liberated and technically hobbled.
This makes total sense in terms of marketing, of course. The photo app industry operates at the pleasure of the phone format. It has no interest, frankly, in solving many editing or creative problems for people who intend to re-work phone images for use in other formats or media. The cel and the app are perfect partners, each amping up usage and adoption by the other, and so all apps have to do is find out how to make people take and share more phone images. The rest of the photographic universe, for them, is basically moot.
And so there is no real incentive to expansively improve the image integrity of app-derived photos, because they look good enough on what they were designed for and for the users to whom they are marketed. And that’s not likely to change in the near future, if ever, which makes apps of limited value for a substantial portion of the photographic user base. Certainly we use apps to mostly “see what happens when I do this”, but ideally, we also want pictures that rise to a certain standard of quality, regardless of how they’re eventually to be used, and we’re a long way out from that particular harbor.
SHOULD AULD ACQUAINTANCE BE FORGOT…
An experimental mix of pedestrian and auto space shows Times Square in transition, 2009.
By MICHAEL PERKINS
AS I WRITE THIS, in about the eleventh hour of the new year 2023, cleaning crews are still restoring Times Square to its regular state of controlled chaos, a steady rhythm of wretched excess that, every December 31st, erupts into an even more intense blizzard of litter and license, a national ritual marking the shift from one year to another. And along with the tons of confetti and collapsed Planet Fitness top hats that will be swept away, the square itself, like an endlessly re-sculpted shoreline, settles back into a shape that is totally the same and yet totally different.
It’s hard to believe that ’23 will only mark the ninth year since the conversion of the world’s most famous address to 100% pedestrian traffic. What began in 2009 as a partial experiment in accident control (following a tsunami of auto mishaps in the neighborhood) proved so popular that, by 2014, a permanent change was effected, making Times Square a total walking district/would-be park, or “public space” as we now call it. During the transition, native New Yawkers griped about the Square’s total surrender to the dreaded onslaught of tourists, and the area’s main architectural feature became five-story, perpetually-blazing billboards for Broadway shows, chain restaurants and soft drinks. Nearly a decade later, the jury’s still out on whether the changes produced a bright, cheery playland or a grotesque Sodom. The answer you get depends on who you ask.
Just two years later, in 2011, the Square has been completely converted to 100% foot traffic. How Times (Square) change(s).
The take-away for photographers is that if, on any given day, you see a version of the Square that you like, preserve it, as I did in the above from a Sunday morning in November of 2011. Like all other images before it, this particular “Times Square” is now a frozen abstraction of a place that is just the same, only different. And it was ever thus: going back nearly a century to when the “new” Times building opened to literal explosions of dynamite to mark the incoming year, the neighborhood has served as a mercurial barometer of America’s quick, impatient transit. Perhaps it was the crossroads effect, the coming together of so many disparate motives, all colliding near the nexus of the popular press, show business, and loud, insistent commerce. Perhaps it is our worhip of the novel, the new. For whatever reason, the Square evolved from day-to-day like the subtle oscillations of a seismograph, taking a measure of the country’s cultural plates and how they scrape and grind against each other in the city’s inexorable tectonic ballet.
We all understand the concept that only change is permanent. After all, even the New York Times only occupied offices at “One Times Square” for eight years. Still, there are few places on Earth where that impermanence is evidenced in such undeniably visual detail. Life in New York at large is all, to a degree, arranged around the dictum of Do It Now. But in Times Square, the frames of film flicker by so very quickly that individual images, no longer distinguishable, rush into a blurry illusion of continuous motion….the ultimate movie. Small wonder that we treasure a few frozen frames as the parade crushes past us.
thenormaleye 