SAME CANVAS, FRESH STROKES
By MICHAEL PERKINS
DUCK INSIDE ANY GIFT SHOP IN A BEACH TOWN and you are immediately awash in paintings, shirts, mugs, posters and assorted other bric-a-brac of the area’s most familiar tourist attraction, captured and immortalized in any and every medium. Want a potholder that will remind you of your great time in Lake WhattaLoada every time you take a sheet of cookies out of the oven? Right over there, sir. Lotsa sale items, too.
What such displays demonstrate is just how closely we all tend to agree on “what’s to see around here”, as well as just how tough it is to bring anything fresh or new to the 5,000,000th view of the gorgeous local waterfall, the awesome local ruins, the vibrant local boardwalk, etc., etc. Strangely, this can mean that, say, the Eiffel Tower may be among the hardest things on earth to photograph, because everything, but I mean everything, has already been said about it. Every visitor “destination” presents a similar challenge, as you become just the latest schnook to try to snap that town’s Great Historic Whatsis.
In Ventura, California, the G.H.W. is the local pier, which, in one form or another, has stretched into the Pacific just opposite the downtown since it was opened in 1872 as a transportation hub and commercial wharf used to bring merchandise and lumber to the area and to export the area’s agricultural products and crude oil. These days it is used for fishing and as a pedestrian walkway with views of Ventura and the Channel Islands, which stretch North and South about an hour’s sail from shore. Over the years, Mother Nature has spanked, split and splintered her dozens of times, and time and time again, the city fathers/mothers choke up the cash to patch her up for the tourists and locals. It is impossible to imagine Ventura (original town name San Buenaventura, given that every third locality here is named after a saint) without the thing.
And so, now that I myself am a local, it photographically haunts me, or rather dares me to find something, anything fresh to do with it as a subject. I attack it from every angle or aspect, and always seem to snap into the same track as all the other human satellites orbiting around it. And, as I say, the shops in town are like a kaleidoscopic gallery of all the various attempts made by folks like me. We’ll never actually master it. But taking our shot is beyond irresistible, like trying to swim against the tide. The canvas doesn’t change; the only real difference is which brushstroke we choose…….
HERE TO STAY
By MICHAEL PERKINS
IMPERMANENCE IS GENERALLY THE ONLY PERMANENCE HUMANS KNOW, with the world collapsing inward and rolling back upward like kneaded bread dough. No sooner does one of this world’s societal textures surface but it gets folded under and turned out of sight. And within that “general” pattern there is an even more insistent rhythm of change that is uniquely American. We Yanks feverishly worship the new and doggedly discount the old, tearing down just as speedily as we built up. Having reverence for age, experience or context is often too tall an order for us. And so, in America, the demolition crews and the construction gangs are in a continuous tag-team flow.
And if this is generally true in American cities in general, it is even more so in places designed for high turnover, like resort spots or beach towns, where a dizzying worship of the novel confers a kind of gypsy status on most local businesses. That’s why, as a photographer, I am not only impressed but amazed to find places that have lasted and even thrived for more than six months straight. As one example, my new hometown of Ventura, California, a beach town’s beach town, has been in the heart of a major regentrification boom for the past decade or so. Lots of that new energy naturally flowed from the business district’s forced improvs in the wake of the pandemic, when everything in town adopted a change-or-die mentality. After the smoke cleared, it was easy to see which local joints had the best staying power, because, well, they stayed.
I will always slow my roll (and break out my camera) for any place sporting an “in business since (year)” sign, and so I absolutely had to check out both the street face and the bill of fare at Tony’s Pizzaria, just three blocks off the Pacific, and, as it says up front, “est. 1959”. I always shoot the entrances of such places head on, as if they are sets in a stage play, and I always hope to convey their true atmosphere by catching some customers In The Act Of. And in case you’re wondering, why, yes, I did try the pizza, and other than losing the top-half of a molar crown that was already on its last legs (roots?), I rate it a wondrous experience. I’d like to think that someone could drive past Tony’s in 2059 and marvel, as I did, that some things, even inside a centrifuge, can last.
thenormaleye 