Max Kozloff, in his introduction to this book of Perkis’s photographs, writes that these images are “pauses extracted from the current of ordinary viewing,” and also notes the way that often, what’s significant in a picture is “usually though not always set apart by a view through an aperture or enclosure” (p 9). It’s this combination of factors that makes me like Perkis’s work so much. (Later, in an interview at the back of the book with John Braverman Levine, Perkis says: “Photography used to be evidence of things seen. The value of being receptive and sensitive in our culture has been practically eliminated. Now everybody’s a doer, a maker, an idea person, rather than being receptive, seeing things, observing”: another thing that appeals (p 278).) <\/p>\n
Perkis’s strongest city-pictures are layered images in which there’s a lot going on at once: kids sitting by a window, in what looks like a train car on an elevated track, and through the grille of the window there’s a bus half-visible, and then below that, through the clear part of the window, a trio of motorcyclists crossing an intersection, headlights glinting. Or in a picture captioned “Chinese New Year, New York City,” there’s the sidewalk and dirty snow and a truck and a van in the road, a ladder, a bus-stop with a Christian Dior ad, a coffee cup on the ground, and two pedestrians passing by in winter coats, one with a shopping bag, a bunch of flowers. The transparent panels of the back of the bus stop reflect the street scene, just barely, but also let you see through to the sidewalk. In a picture captioned “Madison Avenue, New York City,” a Christmas wreath on a window frames a scene in a hair salon, a row of chairs with clients, a blond woman looking at her hair in the mirror. Other pictures in the books are landscapes: all the pictures in this book are black and white, and the country scenes are often richly textured: in my favorite, a scene from Warwick, New York, there’s a field with short grass and low mist; at the back of the image is a dark line of trees, mostly pines, but with some tall bare branches of deciduous trees at the top, and in the foreground there’s a perfectly still puddle reflecting a patch of sky, those branches and the grey cloud behind them. There are city scenes without people, too: a cinderblock wall with a large white rectangle painted on it, and the oil-stained and cracked pavement in front of it: a picture like a minimalist painting. Some of Perkis’s images use mirrors to frame and fragment: a wonderful photo of Istanbul, six mirrors on a wall, and the street scene in bits and pieces reflected behind, buildings here, a car’s windshield there. Or in a store in Mazatlán, there are shoppers, framed pictures of Christ, and below one, a mirror reflecting a woman leaning by a counter, seemingly waiting for someone, seemingly lost in thought.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Max Kozloff, in his introduction to this book of Perkis’s photographs, writes that these images are “pauses extracted from the current of ordinary viewing,” and also notes the way that often, what’s significant in a picture is “usually though not always set apart by a view through an aperture or enclosure” (p 9). It’s this […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-189","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-nonfiction"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/189","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=189"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/189\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=189"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=189"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=189"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}