Swimming in the Mystery

To coincide with the relatively recent publication of the photographer Philip Perkis’s innovative book, Nōtan, we have posted an extensive oral history with him on our website that we recorded a few years ago at his home and studio in Stony Point, New York. 

Over the course of a few days, Philip shared with us stories about his childhood and his poor performance in school (which he would not come to understand until the age of fifty was from dyslexia), how his specific academic struggles at Brandeis University led him to enlist in the Air Force in the 1950s, where he served as a tail gunner on a B-36 heavy bomber, and how it was during this experience that he was introduced to photography by one of his colleagues. He elaborates in fascinating detail on how traveling informed his attitude toward making photographs, the technical details around his photographic processes, his attitudes around constraints and influences, and the meeting of his wife, Cyrilla Mozenter, and their ongoing artist connection and collaboration.

Amongst these observations, Philip reveals a host of speculations and meditations about art and life such as how he likes to “swim” in mystery, and his notion of correspondence, that the voice of an artist derives from the subjects they find in the world that correspond to something within them that they can channel. And he touches on his experience of vision loss due in part to macular degeneration, which led him to stop making photographs in 2021 and turn his attention to writing.

The oral history provides a glimpse of the captivating labyrinth of Philip’s life, work, and mind and is a fascinating read—albeit a long one at 78 pages. We have thus compiled a few choice excerpts below, which we hope might entice you to take a deep dive and read the oral history in its entirety. Also for further in-depth reading, Philip’s book Nōtan weaves together passages of memoir, short stories, and a selection of his last photographs to evoke the mysteries of life, of seeing, and of art. Copies are available for sale at photo-eye Bookstore.

Philip grew up in Brookline, Massachusetts, the son of Jewish immigrants from Ukraine. He did poorly in school because, as he learned when he was fifty, he was dyslexic. He did have unusually good vision, however, upon which he depended from his earliest years:

I always was looking… I didn’t know I was doing that. But when I started photographing, and then when I started teaching, and I realized how most people don’t look—they just don’t look—I realized that I was always looking. One of the therapists I saw later in my life said, “Well, that’s how you could survive, was to watch for visual clues.”…

I could see the atmosphere. I could see what people were feeling. And so, becoming a photographer when I was twenty-one, it was like, “Of course.” It was finding where I belonged in my life… I did photography almost every day for sixty-five years until I got stopped by my vision loss.

Upon finishing high school, he studied briefly at Brandeis University. Because of his dyslexia, which went undiagnosed at the time, it was a struggle for him, and the university asked him to leave, whereupon he enlisted in the Air Force. He joined the Air Force “naively thinking [he] would fly,” only to realize that he needed to have been an officer to do so. He was nonetheless afforded flying status when his physical exam showed him to have “very strange vision that was unusually good. It was something like 20/12. I could read newspapers six feet away, and my near vision was perfect.” As a result, he became a tail gunner on a B-36 crew, which he credits as one of the factors that made him a photographer:

I was on a crew, a B-36 crew, which is between twelve and fourteen men, depending on the missions… It was the heavy bomber that replaced the B-29, which is the bomber that dropped the nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. So it was a huge airplane, ten engines… a complete disaster of a plane.

I was not in the back. The tail gunner was not near the tail guns. I was forty feet forward of that in a compartment with either two or three other people. The guns were controlled by radar. And so I learned how to maintain and use the radar system, which at that time was before transistors. It was all vacuum tubes. The chances of it functioning 100 percent correctly in a combat situation—they used to say it was between 0 percent and 1 percent that it would be successful. But that was my job, and I was pretty good at it. The plane was huge. I mean, unbelievably big—I think it’s the largest airplane ever made except for the Spruce Goose of Howard Hughes.

We used to fly for between twenty-two and thirty hours and with no refueling. So we carried enormous amounts of fuel. It had six propeller engines and four jets, and the jets were used to take off in climbing. When some of the propeller engines failed, which they did nearly every mission, we would use the jets to fill in to keep us going.

So I’m sitting in the back of the plane and my main job was not the gunnery but just simply looking out the bubble on one or the other side of the back of the plane to keep my eye on the engines and look for other aircraft. Hour after hour after hour of sitting in a chair with a parachute on my back and headphones, because it was so loud back there you couldn’t talk without headphones. Frequently an oxygen mask on too. Just watching.

I think that’s one of the factors that made me a photographer—just sitting hour after hour after hour in this incredibly, painfully unpleasant environment of the noise and the smell and the motion and stuff like that, looking out at the ocean and the sky and the clouds and the land and the changing light. The way I put it at one point was, I’m sitting in hell looking at heaven.

While in the Air Force he was introduced to photography by a fellow enlistee by the name of James Mitchell. As soon as he began taking and printing photos, he knew he was “home:”

I found a culture where I felt I belonged. I could go around with this camera and—I don’t know, there’s no words for it—I could express correspondence. I had no words for it then. This is seventy years later, or sixty-eight years later. I found things outside of me that matched what was inside me, my sadness and my loneliness, and my sense of beauty and my sense of space, and my sense of just the melancholy beauty and wonder of the world… [T]his is stuff that I was able to articulate only many, many decades later.

And it’s still there. I can’t see it, but it’s there. I mean, actually, I can see it because what I’m seeing now is really beautiful, two shapes and the glowing of light around you…

After his stint in the Air Force, he enrolled at the San Francisco Art Institute, one of the few colleges at the time that offered courses of study in photography:

The day I got out of the Air Force I stopped shaving and let my hair grow long. I was enamored of the Beats. I thought they knew things, and that was my entrance to culture…

I got out of the Air Force in June and went to San Francisco in September to attend the San Francisco Art Institute. I was surprised they let me in because my academic record was pathetic. But then when I got there, I realized they let anybody in. I mean, there were people there who hadn’t even finished high school.

Several high-profile artists were then teaching at the San Francisco Art Institute, including Richard Diebenkorn, David Park, Elmer Bischoff, Frank Lobdell, Deborah Remington, Joan Brown and Jay DeFeo. Ansel Adams taught a photography class, but it was Minor White who left an indeliable mark on Philip:

Minor White came to the Art Institute and taught a two-week workshop, meeting almost every day and looking at pictures and talking. He was a religious person. A spiritual person. He was involved with all kinds of mystical stuff. He was traveling with a young man named Paul Caponigro… At the Art Institute, I had a scholarship because of my veteran status (and no other money). So I was put in charge of making sure that Minor White had slide projectors and the room where he was going to lecture had chairs in it and that he had always had a bottle of scotch near him.

We became friends. He was the leading representative, I would say, of the idea of photography as a “spiritual pursuit.” It changed me, those two weeks. I started seeing other possibilities in photography.

When Philip finished at the Art Institute, he and his first wife, who was a painter, moved to New York with their young daughter. They were both from the East Coast and wanted to be closer to home, but, more importantly, as he says, “New York was just where you went. You went to New York and lived downtown. That’s what you did.” During his first years in the city, he was focused on “survival. Getting enough money to live.” He worked in the darkroom of a company that produced glossies for actors and musicians, worked as a printer for a fashion photographer, managed the office of a commercial photographer:

I remember when I first came to New York, we had a one-room apartment, the three of us [Philip, his first wife, and his daughter]. My friend Arthur Freed had a dark room in a storefront, one of those storefronts on Third Street where you walked down to get into it so there was no light. He had built a darkroom there and invited me to share the rent and use it. That was my first darkroom in New York.

In 1964, he was hired as a teaching fellow by Phillips Academy. He and his family spent a year in Andover before returning to the city. A few years after his return, he started teaching at Pratt. He retired as a full professor when he turned sixty-five (he continued to teach part-time at Pratt and other institutions). After his retirement, he poured what he had learned during his many years at Pratt about teaching photography (which to some degree was what he had learned about vision) into a slender book, Teaching Photography. More of a philosophical text than a hands-on manual, Teaching Photography is a bestseller in South Korea and was recently included on the syllabus of a poetry course at Vassar College:

When I started teaching [photography] it was a new field. There was no guidance on how to teach photography at the college level, so we had to invent what we were doing. Everybody had different ideas, including me. Then I was chairman of photography at Pratt for quite a few years, and I worked on curriculum development and stuff like that, so I was interested in whether you can teach somebody that, and does it belong in an art school, and what’s the relationship of photography to the other visual arts? All these questions that came up, I thought about them quite a lot and took notes when I was teaching. [At the same time] I would hire people to teach and then help them develop their ideas. So when I stopped, I just started writing things in a notebook. I didn’t think of making a book to publish.

I don’t write well, I write well but I can’t spell at all and my handwriting is, to put it mildly, eccentric—[but] Cyrilla can read my handwriting and likes it, and so she typed up some of my writing on white paper so it was legible, and then my friend Owen [Butler], who taught at the Rochester Institute of Technology, was visiting, and I showed him some of it. He said, “Let’s do a book.”

So, we published a book at the Rochester Institute of Technology. They paid for the whole thing, and I think the first edition was three hundred copies. The school kept 150, and I got 150, and we sold them by mail to people we knew. People liked it. Then Taehee [Park], who was a dear friend and is our publisher in Korea, she saw it and said, “May I translate it into Korean?” I said, “Sure.” She did, and it became a very popular book in Korea. She has sold thousands of copies. It’s actually supported her publishing company for years. I just did it, I don’t know. I never wrote anything much before.

When Philip takes pictures, he shoots very quickly to avoid thinking about content and to instead tap into “correspondence:”

When I’m taking pictures, when I’m actually focusing, setting the f-stops and shutter speeds, stuff like that, and releasing the shutter, I’m trying to not think about content at all. I’m just trying to get it right, and I shoot very quickly.

I shoot very quickly, even when the thing I’m taking a picture of isn’t moving. I don’t spend time looking and a little of this, a little of that. I shoot very quickly because I don’t want to overintellectualize the structure of the picture. Allen Ginsberg says it perfectly: “First thought, best thought.” I photograph quickly and I take a lot of pictures. The editing is where I sense correspondence. The quality that what’s going on out there is talking to something that’s going on in here, here, and here.

For the last twenty-five or thirty years I haven’t made proofs. I don’t make contact sheets. I develop a film, and I put those sheets, the strips of film, into these clear plastic holders. And so it’s a sheet with thirty-six images. And then I sit at a light box with a very good magnifier, and I just look at each frame. When I feel something—because frequently you can’t even tell what it’s a picture of when you’re looking at the negatives—when I see something that does something, I print it. That’s my editing process.

Philip is unusual in that he has no attachment to any particular subject or theme as a photographer. His vision is the unifying principle, which makes his work difficult to categorize (or “pigeon-hole,” as he says):

Even though I’ve photographed in a lot of different places in the world, I don’t claim to have documented anything or explained what anything is like. It’s just what I saw. I went to Mexico, and this is what I looked at. I went to Egypt, and this is what I looked at. I went to Israel, and this is what I looked at. I went to Stony Point, New York, and this is what I looked at. So, I’m not a documentary photographer in any sense…

I have no interest in making a photograph that’s not interesting as an abstraction and tonally. And I take tone to be a big word in the fact that there’s the tone, the gray tone, and then there’s emotional tone, and they’re not separate. And it’s the tone—it kind of has a musical reference in a way—that I’m most interested in. I don’t know if you’ve noticed—I’m sure you have—I don’t care what I take pictures of. It can be cities, a city street or a portrait of someone I know or a landscape or out the window. I don’t care what I photograph. And one of the reasons I’m not more popular is that people don’t really understand that or like that. They like a photographer with a theme. I’ve been told that by a lot of curators and dealers. “What do you photograph?” And I say, “I don’t care. I’ll photograph anything.”

Among Philip’s many achievements and awards, he received a Guggenheim Fellowship to travel to Mexico, which, for reasons that remain mysterious to him, is a country and culture that transfixes him:

I love Mexico. I love Mexicans. I love being there. I’m attracted to it visually and in every other way. And I have no idea why. I’m a first-generation immigrant from Eastern Europe. I don’t speak Spanish. I don’t know Mexico. It’s a madness for me… I wish I could keep going [there]. I just love Mexico. I am not particularly interested in going to Europe. I’ve been there several times, and it doesn’t do it for me. But Mexico is just . . . it’s mysterious and it’s a little frightening and it’s surreal. I don’t know, I can’t really define it. But it’s almost like I was Mexican in my past life, if you want to go in that kind of place, which I don’t. But there’s something wonderful about it.

In elaborating on the idea of “correspondence,” that sense he felt when he first began to take pictures but could only begin to express in words much later, he says:

If there’s a world inside of me and there’s a world inside of you and there’s a world inside of everybody, and then you are out or in the house or whatever and then something strikes you, what is that? It’s a correspondence between what’s inside and what’s outside. It’s a meeting. It’s falling in love in a way, or fear, or whatever.

It’s that correspondence that I think, why does one photographer take this kind of picture and another photographer take a completely different kind of picture? What is it? Why does Ernest Hemingway write the way he does and Gertrude Stein the way she does? They’re both alive at the same time in the same culture. What’s that about? I don’t know what else to say about that, but it’s a beautiful thing to think about. Maybe I’d say one more thing, but it’s tricky. There’s a phrase in—I don’t know what discipline it is—and we used to say this phrase when we were kids to show off how smart we were. “Ontogeny recapitulates by phylogeny.” Do you know it?

It’s “the lifecycle of the individual matches the lifecycle of the species.” What I go through as an individual is also what the human species goes through, and everybody else also.

Philip says he is standing on the shoulders, among others, of Alfred Stieglitz, Robert Frank (especially his book The Americans), and Julia Margaret Cameron. But the nineteenth century photographer Timothy O’Sullivan has had a particularly “huge influence” on him:

[O’Sullivan] was a documentary photographer, and he worked for Matthew Brady documenting the Civil War and other things. And then he photographed the exploration of the West. He was there to collect facts… His job was to produce evidence of the beauty and strangeness and interestingness of the western United States, which was just being opened up. And then there’s this incredible spiritual poetic thing behind all his pictures that gives me the chills. I think he’s an incredibly good photographer. I think there was something going on with him, and he was not an intellectual.

Outside of photography, he has been profoundly influenced by Jazz, the improvisational nature of which remains key to his own approach to artmaking:

The first art form that I related to was jazz. I was about twelve years old. Jazz uses chance and improvisation, and I was always thrilled by that. So that was part of it. But John Cage, the recording I have that I’ve been listening to for it’s now fifty years, is very important to me… It’s John Cage and David Tudor. David Tudor is playing the piano and John Cage is telling ninety stories in ninety minutes. The longer stories, he talks faster, and the shorter stories, he talks slower.

Indeterminacy in Modern Music. It’s a very important piece of art. He just tells these stories. Some of them are his own experiences and some of them are stories that he’s read or heard or something like that. And some of them are very funny and some of them, David Tudor blocks them out, he plays the piano and I think three radios, and he’s inside the piano doing within the strings and stuff like that.

Click below to listen to John Cage and David Tudor, Indeterminancy 2 (1992), courtesy Smithsonian Folkways Recordings.

One of the qualities of photography that he finds striking is the way in which we tend to take photographs as being truthful, when in fact they often do not accurately report or represent what has occurred:

[My] photograph of the people in the backyard, the little kids and other people playing and the little girl standing there, you know the picture?

It looks like a dramatic, sad, mysterious thing, and what it was in reality was my older grandson’s high school graduation party. It was a joyous occasion, and I’m sure all those people were having a really good time, but that moment completely changed the atmosphere of it. It had nothing to do with the atmosphere of that afternoon on that lawn at my daughter’s house. Nothing. It’s a good photograph, but it doesn’t report accurately what was going on at all.

Philip has been married to his second wife, the artist Cyrilla Mozenter, for over thirty-five years. As part of their ongoing artistic dialogue, they have published two books in concert, Octave and ar (2023). Octave presents an unfolding sequence of Philip’s photos and photos of Mozenter’s drawings and sculptures. ar, published after Philip stopped making photographs because of vision loss, pairs his writing with images of Mozenter’s work. Both books speak of a shared visual path between them, one rooted, Philip feels, in the similar “quest” they are on, a quest that involves “swimming in the mystery”:

It’s interesting because our work has absolutely nothing in common physically. She’s a drawer and a sculptor and I’m a photographer, so our work is not similar at all. But what’s behind it, I think, is very similar. I don’t know how to describe that similarity easily, but we’re both after something that . . . we’re both on a search in our lives, and we’re searching together. And we seem to have a karmic connection in that way. Even though our work doesn’t look alike at all, I think that it’s similar in the sense of its quest.

There’s a thing in that movie [Philip is referencing a film made about him called Just to See: A Mystery] that I’m sure you’ve looked at where I talk about swimming in the mystery. I love being in the mystery. I don’t know if I say it in the movie, but I say it all the time: a real mystery has no solution. It’s not a puzzle. It’s not like the thin man knows who did it. Life is a mystery. And Cyrilla and I share that [feeling] very, very deeply. We’re very lucky that we have each other, that we found each other.

Even before he began to experience vision loss, Philip was extraordinarily interested in and aware of vision and how it works. He was compelled to think about it because he realized that the human eye and the eye of a camera “see” differently, a fact that photographers must be cognizant of.

We have these, how many senses? Hearing, vision, taste, feeling. We hear everything, and then our mind decides what to pay attention to. We’re in a bar and we’re talking to someone and the pianist is playing a little tune and there are people next to us having a conversation and then there’s somebody down at the end of the bar yelling for another beer. But we pay attention to the person we’re talking with. When it’s hot, I feel the heat on my skin, and it either bothers me or it doesn’t. When I taste something, I taste that it’s sour or sweet or something, and I like it or I don’t like it. With vision, we choose what to look at. Our field of vision is actually extremely small. Of sharp vision, at least. Because we only see sharply with our macula.

The rest of the retina, which is over 90 percent of it, is out of focus. In my teaching book I have what I call the push-pin exercise where you put two push pins in the wall, three inches apart, very close, and you sit ten feet away and you concentrate on the push pin on the left. You really look at it and you realize that the push pin on the right is slightly fuzzy. And then you shift your vision to the push pin on the right, and you realize that the push pin on the left is slightly fuzzy. My brain, or whatever it is, looks at things and chooses what to look at to see the sharpness.

I mean, my vision’s gone [now], but if I [still] had good vision, if I looked at the leg of that tripod, the center leg, the leg to the right and the left would be slightly fuzzy, but Brian would be way out of focus. I wouldn’t recognize who he was. Vision is the only sense that [involves choice]: we choose what to look at. The camera—depending on the lens you have on and the angle that it’s looking, there are wider lenses and more narrow lenses—it sees everything equally from left to right and top to bottom, not front to back. That’s a focus thing. But from left to right and up and down, it sees everything with equal emphasis. So photographing is very different than looking, and I had to train myself to learn the difference.

Philip began to experience vision problems in 2007, when a retinal occlusion left him with almost no sight in his left eye: “It just shut off,” he says. His left eye had been his dominant one; he had used it to take pictures for fifty years. At first, when he would pick up his camera and try to hold it to his right eye, he physically couldn’t do so—it would “sneak across to [his] left eye,” as he says. After about six months, though, he adapted and started to look through a small point-and-shoot camera with his right eye. His resulting pictures, he feels, such as from a series called “Twilight,” are more abstract and dreamlike.

In 2015, the vision in his right eye began to weaken because of macular degeneration. Depending on the lighting, he can see larger forms, but he cannot see detail, such as facial features or expressions. If someone is present, but the light is behind them, they disappear completely from his field of vision and “blend into the whole.” As his macular degeneration progressed, he realized that he was eventually not going to be able to make photographs anymore and thus consciously undertook what he calls “The Last Photographs,” a selection of which have been published in Nōtan:

When I realized that I was headed for not photographing… I took that point-and-shoot camera and I said, I’m going to try for a year. And I just started photographing in the house and around the house, and mostly at this small park that Cyrilla and I had been going to. We really like it. It’s a park that’s completely not fancy. There’s a swing set there and there’s a little bench. Nothing much, but it’s very beautiful. We went there quite a bit.

So I just started taking pictures here in the yard and out the windows and at that little park and another park up by Bear Mountain and photographing and developing film and printing. And I kept it up for, I guess about fourteen months. And then at a certain point, I realized, “Stop before they get not good anymore.” I wanted to stop at the top of my game. I have sixty prints from that period. I just walked out of the darkroom, and I think there’s still a negative in the enlarger. It was like, “That’s it.”…

I almost eliminated subject matter, which I think has been something I’ve been trying for for a long time. You have to have subject matter in photography and in writing. Music and painting and sculpture, you don’t need subject matter. But photography and writing, you need subject matter. It has to be about something. And I think I’ve gotten that down to a pretty minimal thing, like a shadow on a wall or a little piece of ice on the sidewalk or something like that.

In closing, another quote from Philip about not knowing and “swimming in the mystery”:

[W]hat keeps me going is not knowing. Somebody once said, “As soon as you know the single reason for anything, you know you’re wrong.” I think that’s pretty smart…

I want to swim in the mystery. Because there’s no answers. I mean, who can figure this thing out? We kill each other? We kill each other? What’s that? And then there’s a guy named Albers who paints squares, and you can stand in front of them and have a transcendent experience, or a simple bowl made in Korea a thousand years ago, and you can just stand in front of it and it’s transcendent. You can’t figure that out, and it’s stupid to try.

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You can download a PDF of the entire oral history here. If you use passages from it in your own work, please credit The American Macular Degeneration Foundation (AMDF)

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