By MICHAEL PERKINS
PHOTOGRAPHS ARE MORE AN INSIDE-OUT THAN OUTSIDE-IN PROCESS. We tend to think that the images we capture just sort of seeped or flooded their way into our cameras, but, just as often, we begin with a desire behind our eyes that then pours itself outward into the lens. Point of view is the real determinant of how a picture will be created: the thing is never really as simple as pointing at something and shooting. Where we stand, our choice of tools, our intuitive interpretation...these make or break a picture.
In recently shooting the "Canopy Walk", a new treetop-height attraction in Reynoldsburg, Ohio's Blacklick Woods Metro Park, I found myself confounded by the rangy, twisty contours of the platform. None of my standard lenses seemed able to corral the thing into a single frame, and, after several attempts to tell its story in that fashion, I switched gear completely and opted for an approach I can only call cubist.
The widest lens I have in my kitbag is a TTArtisan 11mm lateral fisheye, which can enable more than one plane of view at a time, similar to cubist work from Picasso and other painters who felt imprisoned by the standard flat image and tried to suggest all sides of their subjects (left, right, over, under, etc.) by simply painting it that way, and "reality" be damned. The fisheye gives a photographer much the same freedom, as, in this image, we're looking both down onto the forest floor, as if shooting from above, and up to the bottom of the platform, as if looking skyward. The lens also creates the illusion of looking around corners that would appear like hard angles in viewing them with a standard optic, plus both compressing and exaggerating spaces as they are twisted into strange mutations of their actual dimensions. The overall sensation is one of bigness, but a surreal kind of bigness, a design sprawling out of control. Like a cubist painting, the image is one of disorientation, a deconstruction of reality.
Or maybe it's just a weird picture.
As is always the case, there is either a connection between my own queer cubism and the viewer's tolerance, or there isn't. The idea of making a picture isn't really to have the final say but to have the first say, and then get a conversation going. Where we meet, or don't meet, on each others terms of what "art" is can be frustrating or fun, actual or true.
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