INVISIBLE BLIGHT
By MICHAEL PERKINS
CLEAR BACK IN THE LATE 1940’s, ARCHITECT FRANK LLOYD WRIGHT began correspondence with various agencies and even president Harry Truman to protest the construction of an array of massive electrical towers proposed for the open desert directly opposite his seasonal headquarters at Taliesin West in Scottsdale, Arizona. He was furious at the idea of the pristine view out the front door of his architectural academy being polluted with the sight of the metal monsters, and proposed that the power lines connecting them be buried underground. Wrong century for fighting the westward advance of American infrastructure. The towers were built and Wright reversed the entrance to his retreat, architecturally turning his back on the ugly sight.
Skip forward three-fourths of a century later and views all over the world are still blocked and blighted with the hideous snarl of wires and relays from the 1900’s. It is the kind of visual garbage that, as regular citizens and especially as photographers, we have all learned to not see, rather like looking through a windshield that is so coated with spatters and bug guts that our lacerated eyes simply focus through it all. Moving from Wright’s bailiwick in Scottsdale to Ventura, California nearly two years ago, I found myself with a stunning view out my apartment terrace of the Topatopa mountain range which, like many peaks along the central coast of the state, rises up rapidly from the nearby Pacific shoreline, going from warm sands to snow-capped peaks of well over 7,000 feet in height within just a few miles. It is the kind of view that begs to be captured in a camera, one of nature’s photographic freebies.
Except.
Except that, to my amazement, while composing the shot, I was astonished by the degree to which I simply did not notice that any view of mountains would have to be through a maze of wires. More upsetting than the horrible clutter of the scene was realizing that I had simply become accustomed, over far too many years, to just not seeing them at all. I once heard a Nikon ambassador say that one of his students could have been on an ocean liner, hundreds of miles from land, and still manage to get wires into her pictures. Now, I was that person, instead of the champion of intentional vision that I had convinced myself I was. Given the gorgeous sight of snow across the top of the Topatopas the other day, I’m still glad I took the shot, although it now goes, along with many other near misses, into the Good Idea, But file. In my youth, I held put the hope that that file would shrink somewhat as I grew old and wise in my photographic pursuits. But, as it turns out, the mountain of mastery is always there, day after day, and just as dauntingly tall, no matter how many times you loop around the race track. And learning to look for what you’ve taught yourself not to see, the invisible blight, is part of that daily ascent.
OF DISTANCES AND DOMAINS
Designed by humans? Certainly. Designed for humans? Well….?
By MICHAEL PERKINS
PHOTOGRAPHY IS AN EFFECTIVE WAY TO MEASURE MAN’S RELATIONSHIP to his physical environment, giving us the distance we need to see these arrangements from a more objective distance. People design places in which other people are to live and work, but once these plans get off the drawing board, it can become unclear what people’s place in the whole puzzle was intended to be.
More to the point, there is real picture-making potential in the occasional mis-match between what we design and how we fit into it. Some things that seem terrific to the people on the planning board seem cold or intimidating to regular users once they’re actually built. Seeing us try to find our place in things that are really inhospitable can be visually interesting because it makes us look and feel somewhat alien. We can become oddly placed props in our own projects, as the places made to house our dreams look more like warehouses for our nightmares.
Of course, one man’s horror is another man’s heaven, a rule that has certainly been constant over the history of innovation. That means, artistically, that we can wind up, inevitably, making images that start arguments, which is, I believe, the perfect function for art anyway. It’s one thing to smear a daub of paint on a canvas and lacerate someone’s vision with it. After all, you can abandon the painting, leave the gallery, etc. But if the building that was meant to be the gallery seems like a bad fit for you as a human being, that’s something else entirely.
The right compositions with the right lenses deliver stark visual messages about how we slot ourselves into the world we’ve created. Sometimes we make a statement for the ages. Sometimes we erect mouse mazes. Either way, there’s a picture in the process.
TESTIMONY
By MICHAEL PERKINS
PHOTOGRAPHY WAS IN ITS INFANCY WHEN IT WAS FIRST PRESSED INTO SERVICE as a reportorial tool, a way of bearing witness to wars, disasters, and the passing parade of human folly and fashion. Since that time, at least a part of its role has been as a means of editorial commentary, a light shone on crisis, crime, or social ills. The great urban reformer Jacob Riis used it to chronicle the horrific gulf between poor and rich in the legendary photo essay How The Other Half Lives. Arthur Rothstein, Dorothea Lange and Lewis Hine, among many others, turned their cameras on the desperate need and changing landscape of America’s Great Depression. And now is the time for another great awakening in photography. It’s time to show where our cities need to go next.
America’s infrastructure is at a crossroads. And that means that photographers are, as well.
Politics aside, the rotting state of our urban infrastructures is an emergency crying out for the visual testimony that photographers brought so eloquently to bear on poverty and war in ages past. The magnifying glass needs to be turned on the neglect that is rapidly turning America’s urban glory into rust and ruin. And no one can tell this story better than the camera.
We can fine-tune all the arguments about how to act, what to fund, and how to proceed. That’s all open to interpretation and policy. But the camera reveals the truths that are beyond abstraction and opinion. The underpinnings of one of the world’s great nations are rapidly dissolving into exposed rebar and pie-crust pavement. If part of photography’s mission is to report the news, then the decline of our infrastructure is one of the most neglected stories in the world’s visual portfolio. Photographers can entice the mind into action, and have done so for nearly two centuries. They have peeled back the protective cover of politeness to reveal mankind at its worst, and things have changed because of it. Agencies have been formed. Action has been accelerated. Lives have been changed. Jobs have been created.
It didn’t used to be an “extra credit” question on the exam of life just to maintain what amazing things we have. Photographers are citizens, and citizens move the world. Not political parties. Not kings or emperors. History is created from the ground up, and the camera is one of the most potent storytelling tools used in shaping that history. The story of why our world is being allowed to disintegrate is one well worth telling. Capturing it in our boxes just might be a way to shake up the conversation.
Again.
THE UNSEEN GEOMETRY
Overhead and out of sight. 1/400 sec., f/5.6, ISO 100, 35mm.
By MICHAEL PERKINS
THERE ARE MANY PHOTO SITES THAT SUGGEST SHOOTS CALLED “WALKABOUTS“, informal outings intended to force photographers to shoot whatever comes to hand with as fresh an eye as possible. Some walkabouts are severe, in that they are confined to the hyper-familiar surroundings of your own local neighborhood; others are about dropping yourself into a completely random location and making images out of either the nothing of the area or the something of what you can train yourself to see.
Walks can startle you or bore you to tears (both on some days), but they will sharpen your approach to picture-making, since what you do is far more important than what you’re pointing to. And the discipline is sound: you can’t hardly miss taking shots of cute cats or July 4 fireworks, but neither will you learn very much that is new. Forcing yourself to abandon flashier or more obvious subjects teaches you to imbue anything with meaning or impact, a skill which is, over a lifetime, beyond price.
One of the things I try to keep in mind is how much of our everyday environment is designed to be “invisible”, or at least harder to see. Urban infrastructure is all around us, but its fixtures and connections tend to be what I call the unseen geometry, networks of service and connectivity to which we simply pay no attention, thus rendering them unseeable even to our photographer’s eye. And yet infrastructure has its own visual grammar, giving up patterns, even poetry when placed into a context of pure design.
The above power tower, located in a neighborhood which, trust me, is not brimming with beauty, gave me the look of an aerial superhighway, given the sheer intricacy of its connective grid. The daylight on the day I was shooting softened and prettied the rig to too great a degree, so I shot it in monochrome and applied a polarizing filter to make the tower pop a little bit from the sky behind it. A little contrast adjustment and a few experimental framing to increase the drama of the capture angle, and I was just about where I wanted to be.
I had to look up beyond eye (and street) level to recognize that something strong, even eloquent was just inches away from me. But that’s what a walkabout is for. Unseen geometry, untold stories.
thenormaleye 