COMFORT
By MICHAEL PERKINS
Home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in.—Robert Frost
PHOTOGRAPHY IS ABOUT BOTH SUBSTANCE AND SYMBOLS, about showing things in their most minute detail, and, alternatively, also about suggesting volumes with simple arrangements of light and shadow. I began my professional life as a writer struggling to fully explain the world, documenting everything from mountains to grains of sand with meticulous accuracy. It was exhausting, and I imagine that it exhausted whatever readers I had at the time as well. Over the decades, I became comfortable with talking less and saying more, especially when it came to the important things like Love, Truth, Knowledge, even the creative act itself. That evolution had the principal effect of streamlining my writing, but it also simplified my approach to photography. I don’t always express the important ideas of life in the simplest terms, but the effort is there.
When it comes to a concept like “home”, I really try to take all the thicker poetic, philosophic and emotional implications of the term and reduce it to the simplest visual symbols I can muster. Buildings instead of the people within them. Stark compositions of color and shade, with an emphasis on under-exposure whenever possible. A muting of the decorative clutter that complicate the impact of a home, with a focus on doors, windows, paths. Strong rectangles and triangles. Lighting that hints at things instead of spelling them out.
As I say, I still waver from a simplicity that, by now, should be an article of faith. Sometimes I use the camera to blurt out a paragraph when a half-sentence will do. In this image, which is not of my own house but a casita I was renting on vacation, I am trying to convey the idea of what the psychologist Christopher Lasch called a haven in a heartless world, or Frost’s concept of a place where “they have to take you in.” The interlocking rectangles and squares, the warm red of the door flanked by the yellowish porch light, the amber tones through the window, and the simple straw welcome mat all combined to form a kind of comfort food for my eye, and I made the picture very quickly. This is not the way to think of “home” merely a way. But it is in finding our own truest ways that we make our truest images. And, more and more, mine run truer when I manage, in small ways, to speak smaller, not bigger.
FIGHTING TO FORGET
By MICHAEL PERKINS
STORIES OF “THE LAND THAT TIME FORGOT” COMPRISE ONE OF THE MOST RELIABLE TROPES IN ALL OF FICTION. The romantic notion of stumbling upon places that have been sequestered away from the mad forward crunch of “progress” is flat-out irresistible, since it holds out the hope that we can re-connect with things we have lost, from perspective to innocence. It moves units at the book store. It sells tickets at the box office. And it provides photographers with their most delicate treasures.
Trackside, 2014. 1/250 sec., f/5.6, ISO 100, 35mm.
Whether our lost land is a village in some hidden valley or a hamlet within the vast prairie of middle America, we romanticize the idea that some places can be frozen in amber, protected from us and all that we create. Sadly, finding places that have been allowed to remain at the margins, that have been left alone by developers and magnates, is getting to be a greater rarity than ever before. Small towns can be wholly separate universes, sealed off from the silliness that has engulfed most of us, but just finding one which has been lucky enough to aspire to “forgotten” status is increasingly rare.
That’s why it’s so wonderful when you take the wrong road, and make the right turn.
The above stretch of sunlit houses, parallel to their tiny town’s main railroad spur, shows, in miniature, a place where order is simple but unwavering. Colors are basic. Lines are straight. This is a town where school board meetings are still held at the local Carnegie library, where the town’s single diner’s customers are on a first name basis with each other. A place where the flag is taken down and folded each night outside the courthouse. A village that wears its age like an elder’s furrowed brow with quietude, serenity.
There are plenty of malls, chain burger joints, car dealerships and business plazas within several miles of here. But they are not of here. They keep their distance and mind their manners. The freeway won’t be barreling through here anytime soon. There’s time yet.
Time for one more picture, as simple as I know how to make it.
A memento of a world fighting to forget.
thenormaleye 