“Of course, there will always be those who look only at technique, who ask ‘how,’ while others of a more curious nature will ask ‘why.’ Personally, I have always preferred inspiration to information.”

- Man Ray

To the local art and photography insiders who viewed “Exposure,” the current Artlink exhibition (it runs through April 6), it wouldn’t be a shock to learn that 13 of the entrants were at one time students of Stephen Michael Perfect, the local photo icon of sorts.

Whether through 25-plus years of formal teaching as the University of Saint Francis, the University of Maine, Indiana-Purdue at Fort Wayne, via Artlink workshops or even in impromptu consultations in the parking lot of Sunny Schick, the 60-couple-year-old Perfect has helped guide hundreds of jittery shutterbugs through a meandering course toward craft mastery.

Perfect’s own work (his images are as varied as the technique and media available to him) have been exhibited throughout the country and reside in several corporate and private collections. They include carbro prints (a process marrying special carbon tissue paper and chemicals); photographic intaglio embossings; small, intimate landscapes printed on hand-sensitized watercolor paper; and large non-objective color abstracts.

He remains atop of his game, and his work was one of three judged winners at Artlink’s Regional exhibition and will, with the other two awardees, join forces in a special show at the gallery in October.

In an artist’s statement accompanying his rich and delightful still life works Perfect writes:

“...still life photographs have come from within; meaning not from any outside assignment. I can work and rework the objects, playing with shape, form, and texture to create an interesting image.

“The pictures have a sense of antiquity ... images that are worn and weathered, giving them a timeless feeling of nostalgia.

“Ansel Adams [another American photo icon] would say that color transparencies and black and white negatives are ‘the score’ from which I am able to make color prints, black and white silver prints, historic non-silver prints and Polaroid transfers.

“I like being a part of this process of discovery: learning and having fun, and not necessarily in that order.”

The musical analogy is an apt one drawn from Perfect’s chief inspiration, his late father, Fredrick “Fritz” Perfect, long-time principle cellist with the Fort Wayne Philharmonic.

“He was a gentle, sensitive and intelligent man who prompted me in all the right ways. He bought me my first camera when I was 12 or so and told me that the best photographer would be the one with the largest wastebasket.

“That’s a lesson I try to pass on to my students with assignments like ‘Shoot a roll (36 exposures) with the camera never more than six inches off the floor. Or, ‘Burn a roll taking pictures of only shadows.’ Other times the subject for focus may simply be a single parking meter.”

These exercises push the students to examine subjects from a myriad of angles. The first 18 exposures are a challenge, he acknowledges; filling the second half of the roll prods the mind to develop alternate frame and field concepts. At that stage, Perfect suggests, the mind is ripe for grasping other ideas, i.e. composition from the outer edge of the frame, letting the subject fight for space and attention in the viewer’s eye. An engaging idea, eh?

More and more as he developed his craft in his youth and as a professional (he has worked for ad agencies, fulfilled assignments for magazines like Rolling Stone and did a stint for a local TV station) he began to understand that his goal of producing painterly effects with a camera couldn’t be accomplished optically. During an excursion to Europe he employed an SX-70 Polaroid, and the medium afforded him the means to manipulate the film emulsion to transform the image, thereby blurring, literally and figuratively, the distinction between a photo and a painting.

Later Perfect would hit the rarified digital world of scanners and computer software coupled with large format printers providing him with yet another set of media to harness en route to his goal.

Perfect’s enthusiasm for his work and his teaching is well-known. Just ask Betty Fishman from Artlink.

“He’s such a gentle and caring teacher, and has been for years,” said Fishman recently. “He was in one of the first-ever exhibits at the gallery some 26 years ago, and he’s taught, mentored in our programs for years pretty much since then. You could call him the ‘grandfather,’ no, maybe a ‘founding father’of local photography and photography education. And his work is always just gorgeous to the eye and the soul.”

The artist is unique in having lived on the cusp of so many technological discoveries. He has one foot firmly planted in the post Second World War celluloid tools and the other resting in the contemporary pixeled universe.

This stance has given him not only a variety of versatile vehicles with which to pursue and teach process, it has provided some “eureka” moments in his own work.

Recently he made a striking discovery that resulted in the amazing image reproduced here. Using a pinhole camera loaded with fast photographic paper, Perfect captured a portrait of metal patio furniture. The curved and arcing arms of the chairs and table together with the perforated surfaces lent themselves totally to the distorted image (realized because of the way the paper film fit into the cylindrical ‘camera’).

He then scanned this primitive black and white negative and colorized it with the aid of computer software before printing. The “eureka” moment materialized when the sensitive scanner actually read the void or white areas of the negative and filled them in with the precisely defined content of the background trees and shrubbery.

The resultant printed image may not totally satisfy Perfect in his quest for using the camera as a brush, but he most certainly continues to build bridges from then to now.

Maybe this reviewer is too easily impressed but, having witnessed the transformation, I’m thinking the guy is an alchemist, magician or maybe even a wizard.