MY FAVORITE DESTINATION
By MICHAEL PERKINS
AS ALREADY STATED IN EARLIER EPISTLES from this little gazette, 2024 was, in every sense, The Year Of The Great Uprooting. In reality, we only moved one state over, from Arizona to California, but in a broader sense, we changed nearly every aspect of our daily lives. After twenty-five years in the Phoenix desert, we changed our entire life context by plunking down just ten minutes from the Pacific Ocean in the coastal town of Ventura. For a photographer, it was like being thrown into the middle of a three-ring circus of fresh visual stimuli; the best possible reset of the senses. It was if I had never seen mountains, or the sea, or farm fields before; I was living like a native but shooting with all the spastic zeal of a vacationer.
Still, with all that fresh fodder of making pictures, I find, on the last day of 2024, that my only possible choice for Most Important Photo Of The Year must, must, must be the candid of my wife Marian that you see here. In many ways, it’s the very definition of ordinary, in that I have shot hundreds of such images of her over our nearly twenty-five years together. However, the feeling that shot through as I happened upon her scrolling her phone in our new apartment, was the same one I get every time I feel compelled to grab a camera….an urgency, based on the belief that this moment must be saved.
Why not a shot of the beach or the hills ’round our new home for the “most important” of ’24? Because Marian is the real reason we landed here. It was her tenacity, her belief, her intense focus that kept me on task and fixed upon the final result during months of preparation; her conviction that, after years of daydreaming, we could actually make the leap to a new life. I am certainly a dreamer, at least when it comes to creative things, but I am something of a layabout, even a bit of a dimwit, when it comes to making practical arrangements. And so the look you see here, the slow-burning, sexy, amazing look I’ve enjoyed for decades, a perfect blend between serene beauty and keen awareness, jumped into my brain in the moment, jumping likewise into a very deep recess in my soul, reminding me why I decided, so long ago, that I had to have this woman in my life. As my life. And so, even though many scenic landscapes and local wonders from our new surroundings are sure to follow, this is the picture that defines the year, and so much more, for me. My favorite destination.
TAPS FOR CHRISTMAS
By MICHAEL PERKINS
By MICHAEL PERKINS
I HAVE BEEN LUCKY ENOUGH TO LIVE TO THE AGE OF SEVENTY-ONE before having to type this sentence:
This will be my first Christmas without my mother.
It’s amazing how long my fingers floated frozen over the keyboard getting that said, but I have to filter all the poignant events of this one year through the lens of her having made it through nearly ninety-one of her own. Memories are odd things; they take whatever form best matches our needs. Sometimes she is with me in the recitation of a family saying, complete with the sound of her voice. Other times, she flashes up in front of me unbidden, summoned through some bizarre daisy chain of impressions that can spring from any and everywhere. Bang, she’s here again. Whiff, she’s gone once more.
We were always a family of picture-takers, and so there is ample documentation of her face at every age, from the crib through her “career” as a high-school majorette to her happiest role, that of a wife to my father for over seventy-two years. Sometimes, in this first year in which she has left an empty chair at the table, I can comfort myself with those images, looking directly into her face. Other times, like this entire month of December, I have to make it through by buffering the reality of her absence a little, “seeing” her in the things she loved.
She loved this season, and filled her house with generations of laughs, tears, parties and celebrations, adding more elegant elements to each succeeding Christmas season. And what you see here were her greatest pride, the “regiment” of nutcrackers she had amassed over thirty-plus years. Each had its story: each was attached to its giver in an unbreakable chain of smiles and remembrance.
This year, the troops were finally retired on the family mantel, perhaps after their bugler has quietly rendered “Taps”, replaced by my sister’s collection of angels, a visual cue that the torch has been passed and Christmas is in the hands of yet another trustworthy caretaker. After this emotionally supercharged month, I will gradually go back to the photos, back to making direct eye contact with that unbelievably beautiful and comforting face. But now, I will have, as the song goes, a merry “little” Christmas, looking again on her handiwork, both in the things she created and the people she adored.
It will be enough.
It will have to be.
TRANSMISSION
By MICHAEL PERKINS
MY MOTHER’S PASSING, JUST A LITTLE OVER A WEEK AGO AT THIS WRITING, has understandably released a tornado of feeling, not all of it tragic. More specifically, the portion that is purely sad is actually quite compact; intense, certainly, and at times devastating, but by no means the dominant current in my head. Gratitude occupies the space within my heart far too greatly to yield much real estate to mere sorrow.
Looking over the many images of Mother for use in the usual tributes, I find myself wishing that someone, somewhere, had taken far more pictures of just the two of us together. That unique transmission of energy, hope, and love between parent and child is a rare quality, and is, in photographs, as visually elusive as heat lightning. Candids from birthdays, Christmases and graduations hint at it; few fully capture the entire miracle.
But, this morning, as I was once again bemoaning how few of those grownup-kid transmissions I possessed to comfort me in her absence, I saw that exact energy in a shot I had made of strangers, a single frame among hundreds in a sequence that I had glanced at once and filed away under For Future Consideration. Suddenly that “future” was upon me, as I rediscovered the image you see here.
Like many photos, it’s as evocative for what it doesn’t show as what it does. I can’t tell if this is merely a tender moment, or one in which the small boy is excited, bewildered, tired or just clingy. And nothing of the mother’s face can be seen at all. In some ways, the picture is unfinished, a rehearsal for something more eloquent promised for a few moments later. However, there is the feeling that these two people are, for this one instant, totally sufficient to each other. Their connection is wonderfully profound. They are of each other, and the rest of the world is, at least for now, irrelevant. Looking at it through the filter of my recent loss, the image is no longer invisible to the current me. It’s now an essential possession, something magical that I was luckier than I knew just to witness.
For a moment, looking at the picture, I forgot about reality, and experienced the feeling that I’d love to show it to Mother. But, in her wisdom and her love, it’s nothing, really, that she hasn’t seen before, nothing she and I haven’t lived before. And that’s enough for now.
THAT’S THE SPIRIT
By MICHAEL PERKINS
JACOB MARLEY, THE RUEFUL GHOST of Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, refers to the manacles and links that trail behind him as “the chain I forged in life”, and indeed, as the years wear on, one can certainly feel the accumulated weight of one’s own “ponderous” train, its clanking amplified to even greater force during the holiday season.
Certain cycles of the year speak louder to our memories than others, whether they mark anniversaries of loss, joy, sacrifice, devotion, or any other emotional life trophies. And the visual arts, including photography, tap into and amplify these feelings in everything from the pages of the calendar to snapshots of dear ones both present and absent.
Both present and absent. Living and dead. Still here and almost gone. Ghosts and survivors. Marley and Scrooge. The photographer can sometimes almost feel the collision of past and present within a single image, as if each force is grappling for control of the picture’s message.
In the above photograph, I was initially looking to steal a candid of my father as he watched some television. It should have been a simple task, but, when your father is still here at 88, the faces of those no longer here echo in his every feature. To add to the density of emotion, you have the fact that he’s seated beneath a mantle fairly buckling under the weight of a third of a century’s worth of well-curated nutcrackers. Thus, even though she’s dodged having her picture taken at this particular moment (a well-honed skill), my mother is present here as well.
And so, decisions, decisions: I could have made my father look over in my direction, maybe even coaxing a smile from him, but I liked his weary look of detachment, as if the years were a kind of Marley chain dragging him earthward. I also could have cropped out the nutcrackers, simplifying the overall frame. But the “ponderous” tonnage of memory the figures symbolize would have been wasted, so they stay.
Photographs can only rarely be snapped in their most complete form, and certain times of year prove too layered with history to make for so-called “simple” pictures. Maybe it’s the different way we see on certain days. And just maybe it’s a ghostly presence, a glimpse of the chain we forged in life.
thenormaleye 