The Sadness of Men

Whenever I am at the local library I always pause by the shelf containing the collections of different photographers and if I find a photograph that catches my eye I'll check out their coffee table book for some inspiration. Recently I checked out "The Sadness of Men: Photographs of Philip Perkis." As with many of these collections some images make you scratch your head. Others, you come back to again and again. With some photographers I've either checked out their books several times or purchased them for my own collection. However, what I found most interesting about this book was an interview conducted by a former student of Perkis, John Levine. In the discussion, Perkis talks about the negative and the print, and I quote:

Edward Weston felt a sadness about printing, because the negatives were so much more beautiful. You're reducing the amount of information from the negative to the print. You're deciding what aspect of the information you're going to present, by lightness, darkness, contrast, what end of the spectrum you're going to emphasize. Printing is making the memory public.

In this day and age of digital photography, one could say that this is still true with the image captured by the camera is different from the one displayed on the computer, web page, or printed paper, that the process of information reduction is the same. Is it though? Digitally speaking, the image (or should I be calling it image data) is not immutable, once it's removed from the camera. Actually, the image can and is changed by the processor in the camera for example when the image is converted to JPEG and stored on the memory chip. Or, if you are dealing with RAW image data, then it has to be converted into a format that the editing program can understand. Through Photoshop I can add or subtract from the image in the computer. Yet again we are altering the image, changing the information contained in it. One could say that information is also changed when film is processed chemically. The loss of silver in the emulsion changing the entropy of the captured image? Another thought occurs to me: the image sensor in a digital camera mimics the color vision of the human eye using what is called a Bayer pattern. Whereas a camera using a silver halide emulsion-based film captures more information than is available to our eyes.

I've worked with both film and digital. It does seem, sometimes, that digital photography does take a bit more work post capture than film, but in the end, I think it's the original capture that matters most and I agree with Weston and Perkis: there is a loss going from capture to print.

Just another thought before I close this post: the bookplate of this book indicates that Philip Perkis is a Professor Emeritus at Pratt Institute and is the author of "Teaching Photography, Notes Assembled." After looking at the pictures and reading the interview inspired me to think about applying to teach a course in photography at one of the local darkrooms. Wouldn't my old high school photography teacher be proud?