Published: August 25, 2006
New York Times

A PHOTOGRAPHER snaps a picture. If it’s a camera with film, a negative is made; if it’s a digital camera, a file is produced. A printer, in a dark room using chemicals, or at a computer screen, can tinker with the image, crop it, enlarge it, make it lighter or darker, highlight one part or obscure another.

In other words, the image produced by the camera, whether it’s a negative or a digital file, is only the matrix for the work of art. It is not the work itself, although if the photographer is a journalist, any hanky-panky in the printing process comes at the potential cost of the picture’s integrity. Digital technology has not introduced manipulation into this universe; it has only multiplied the opportunities for mischief.

I dawdle over this familiar ground because the digitally produced prints of classic Walker Evans photographs, now at the UBS Art Gallery, are so seductive and luxurious — velvety, full of rich detail, poster-size in a few cases and generally cinematic — that they raise some basic issues about the nature of photography.

For starters they suggest a simple question, whether luxury and richness are apt qualities for pictures of Depression-era tenant farmers in the American South. These are, I must say, almost uncomfortably beautiful. In “Let Us Now Praise Famous Men,” where Evans first published many of these photographs in 1941, James Agee, his collaborator, wrote that the book might best have been issued on newsprint to suit the simple and honest character of its subjects. Photography compromises its own value, Agee thought, when it becomes pretentious.For his part Evans notoriously disdained darkrooms and only haphazardly supervised the making of his own prints. But he adopted the new Polaroid SX-70 camera when it came along in 1973, indicating that he wasn’t averse to new technologies; and with his negatives, like most photographers, he occasionally burned in or dodged out passages to make the pictures look more the way he wanted them to, which they couldn’t otherwise. To a negative of the famous portrait of Allie Mae Burroughs, the sharp-faced Alabama tenant farmer’s wife, he attached instructions for exposing furrows in her brow. Adjusting the exposure was the technique he had at hand, a crude one compared to digital technology.

The new Evans prints are made by John Hill, a friend and colleague of Evans’s at the Yale School of Art, in collaboration with Sven Martson, who printed photographs for Evans during the 1970’s. They use carbon pigments. Evans shot these works on assignment for the Farm Security Administration, so they ended up in the Library of Congress as public property, where anybody now has permission to reproduce them.

The digital process allows Mr. Hill and Mr. Martson to uncover details embedded in the negatives, outside the tonal range of the old silver gelatin prints: a shadowy girl in the doorway of a roadside stand near Birmingham, Ala.; numbers painted on a telephone pole beside a gas station in Reedsville, W.Va.; penny-picture faces in a window of a photographer’s studio in Savannah, Ga. The new prints modulate and unify the midranges of grays in these pictures to soften contrasts and give a warmer ambience to photographs that were often sharp and austere in Evans’s gelatin silver prints. Mr. Hill, who put together the show, includes various books, magazines and prints that Evans supervised, so you can make the comparison yourself.

But does this improve the pictures? No. For one thing, it is not possible to improve on the quality of Evans’s originals, only to emulate it. For another, size shifts how we see, both for better and worse. There is a level of concentration required by staring into a small gelatin silver print, a way the image focuses the mind and stays contained within a narrow field of vision, which is among the pleasures of photography. Bigger pictures are read differently more piecemeal, in the way that film in a theater is viewed differently from an image on television or on a computer screen. Evans lugged his large-format camera around the rural South during the heat of summer so that he could make pictures containing lots of detail. And for his Museum of Modern Art retrospective in 1971 he approved the installation of a few blownup photographs as props.

But a new detail revealed by an enlarged digital print becomes a visual fact that, however subtly, affects the balance of the entire picture. Photography is a seamless medium: a whole, continuous image put together at once, which the eye unconsciously distinguishes from a drawn image that is made inch by inch, or pixel by pixel, in the case of a digital image.

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/25/arts/design/25evan.html?ex=1159934400&en=84f7d83d5d92be7b&ei=5070

Art Business News, Oct, 2006 by Barden Prisant

While it may not have the same ring to it, the digital revolution is forcing us all to think in these terms. Of course, new technologies have always brought about paradigm shifts. In the words of the French photographer, Jean-Francois Rauzier, "when photography came along, it created a problem for the world of painting." Now, that digitization has come along, has it created a problem for the world of photography?

According to Stephen Cohen, director of photo new york, "learning digital is another career." Any of us who have tried to make sense of the panoply of settings on a digital camera will empathize. We may know how to take a basic snapshot, but most of us haven't mastered the miscellany of available options.

Photographer Ken Haas, Sharon Springs, NY, believes that this is just fine since, "in the public eye, photography is a visual tape recorder. For most people, it is just a way of keeping a record."

However, for a professional "art photographer," this is not enough. Brian Clamp, of Clamp Art in New York, observes that "the vast majority of (art) photographers use some digital component." Yet, how much they use, and how they use it, is a personal choice. In the words of Chalfont, PA-based Alex Novak, editor of the I Photo newsletter, "photographers ... are skittish about digital; we are starting to see change, though it is not yet total."

In what direction, then, is the digital revolution starting to take the world of art photography? To answer the question, one must consider the three phases inherent in the creation of a photo: image capture, image manipulation, and image printing.

With the ubiquity of digital cameras, one would naturally assume that professionals always use them, too.

One also would be wrong.

"I've seen very few using digital cameras," says Novak, and Clamp agrees. "Most artists are still shooting film and then scanning; I only show one who starts with digital images." The main reason, it would seem, is the limitation placed upon the resolution that can be achieved in the digital realm. The current crop of cameras designed to replace the venerable 35mm Nikon yields images that, according to Clamp, can only be realistically enlarged to 22 x 17 inches. After that, they develop the jagged edges and distortions, which we have all seen when overenlarging a jpeg.

One very noticeable trend in art photography is the interest in creating monumental prints. To "go large," according to Yosefa Drescher of Yosefa Drescher Fine Art, West Hartford, CT, you need to start with a medium format camera, whose film is approximately three to four times the size of 35mm. For that you need to go analogue. Of course, to subsequently take advantage of the available digital manipulation programs, you must scan the image digitally. "That is the way they are usually doing it," she observes.

Once a photographer has a digital and or digitized image in hand, just what can he or she do with it using today's digital manipulation programs?

"It gives you God-like control over every pixel," enthuses Haas. In light of this newfound power, one might wonder just how much manipulation is considered "appropriate." According to Novak, this is where digital has created "a big split in photographers' eyes." It would seem that there are two main schools of thought on this issue: one advocates restraint and the other adventure.

Some collectors would argue that even a restrained use of digital manipulation violates the tenet that a photo must be "100 percent true" to the image which entered the lens of the camera. Yet, photographers themselves have always known that this was not the case. "It was never the truth," declares Drescher. "Even in the old days, manipulating light and shade, you could change so much of so-called reality [in the darkroom]."

For whatever reason, though, there are those who have made a conscious decision to make only limited use of the many tools offered by programs such as Photoshop.

Lisa Holden of Antwerp, Belgium, for example, shoots a digital photo and then prints from it an image so large that the edges start to jag. Then, she hand paints over the distorted areas and subsequently rephotographs the result. According to I Photo's Novak, who sells Holden's works, Holden prints the "rephotographs" in small editions and sells them for $5,000-7,000 each; (the handpainted originals are also available for $10,000 each.)

Another advocate of the restrained use of technology is Marc Yankus of New York. According to Clamp, of Clamp Art, Yankus takes a digital photo and then simply layers over it textures scanned from old tintypes or books. It might just be considered a reworking of the old double negative concept.

Both Holden and Yankus are using their relatively "low-tech" manipulations to generate images that look very much like 19th century paintings. Those of Holden exhibit the jewel-like colors and off-kilter sensibilities of the Pre-Raphaelites, while, if you squint your eyes, a piece by Yankus could be mistaken for a turn-of-the-century Paris street scene.

A few of the 132 million objects held at the Library of Congress

The New York Times
By KATIE HAFNER
Published: March 10, 2007

THE National Steinbeck Center, at the top of Main Street in this farming community, exhibits an array of artifacts from John Steinbeck's life and works: family memorabilia, a passport from the 1960s and movie stills from "The Grapes of Wrath." Downstairs, in a climate-controlled vault, is the original manuscript of "The Pearl," his novella published in 1947. There is also an exuberant letter that Steinbeck wrote to a distant relative when he was a teenager, as well as rare footage of him on 16-millimeter film, introducing a 1961 movie, "Flight."

Steinbeck aficionados wishing to examine the manuscript of "The Pearl," which he wrote in pencil in small, precise handwriting on a yellow legal pad, have to travel here — after making an appointment with a part-time archivist, who is in on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays.

The center takes great care to preserve these relics of Steinbeck, a Nobel laureate, yet it has no plans to take the collection a step further, to adapt to a digital age. As a result, the manuscript of "The Pearl" is no more likely to be digitized than is the camper with the canine-motif curtains that Steinbeck immortalized in his book "Travels With Charley," and that is parked in perpetuity in the center's main exhibition hall.

These Steinbeck artifacts are not the only important pieces of history that are at risk of disappearing or being ignored in the digital age. As more museums and archives become digital domains, and as electronic resources become the main tool for gathering information, items left behind in nondigital form, scholars and archivists say, are in danger of disappearing from the collective cultural memory, potentially leaving our historical fabric riddled with holes.

"There's an illusion being created that all the world's knowledge is on the Web, but we haven't begun to glimpse what is out there in local archives and libraries," said Edward L. Ayers, a historian and dean of the college and graduate school of arts and sciences at the University of Virginia. "Material that is not digitized risks being neglected as it would not have been in the past, virtually lost to the great majority of potential users."

To be sure, digitization efforts over the last 10 years have been ambitious and far-reaching. For many institutions, putting collections online, for both preservation and accessibility, is a priority. Yet for every letter from Abraham Lincoln to William Seward that can be found online, millions of documents bearing fine-grained witness to the Civil War will never be digitized. And for every CD re-release of Bessie Smith singing "Gimme a Pigfoot," the work of hundreds of lesser-known musicians from the early 20th century are unlikely to be converted to digital form. Money, technology and copyright complications are huge impediments.

It is not for a lack of trying.

At the Library of Congress, for example, despite continuing and ambitious digitization efforts, perhaps only 10 percent of the 132 million objects held will be digitized in the foreseeable future. For one thing, costs are prohibitive. Scanning alone on smaller items ranges from $6 to $9 for a 35-millimeter slide, to $7 to $11 a page for presidential papers, to $12 to $25 for poster-size pieces. (The cost of scanning an object can be a relatively minor part of the entire expense of digitizing and making an item accessible online.)

Similarly, at the National Archives, the repository for some nine billion documents, only a small fraction are likely to be digitized and put online. And at thousands of smaller, local collections around the country, the bulk of the material is languishing on yesterday's media: paper, LPs, magnetic tape and film.

Strapped for money, archivists around the country are looking to private partners for help. Google has donated $3 million to help start an effort led by the Library of Congress that will digitize and share materials around the globe, and has also provided technical resources for digitizing various printed materials at the library. Google, on its own, is digitizing books at the Library of Congress, which has its hands full with other items. And a number of other companies and foundations, including Reuters, I.B.M. and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, have financed digitization projects around the world.

Even with outside help, experts say, entire swaths of political and cultural history are in danger of being forgotten by new generations of amateur researchers and serious scholars.

Consider the Library of Congress archive of one million photo prints from The New York World-Telegram & Sun; only 5,407 have been digitized. Of the 1.2 million images from U.S. News and World Report, the library has digitized only 366. Its collection of five million images from Look magazine, spanning the period from 1937 to 1971, creates what Jeremy E. Adamson, director of collections and services at the library, calls "a fascinating portrait of America through photo stories on social and political subjects, personalities, food, fashion and sports." Yet only 313 of those images have been digitized.

"It's a crying shame," Mr. Adamson said, "as today's public is acutely visually literate and comfortable with pictures as a means to understand the past and experience for themselves the direct look and feel of history."

The reason for not digitizing these collections? "Not enough money," Mr. Adamson said.

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THE decision to put off digitizing a significant collection is seldom easy, archivists at the Library of Congress say. Plans to digitize The National Intelligencer, a newspaper published in Washington during much of the 19th century and filled with Colonial script not easily recognized by digitizing equipment, eventually had to be put on hold because of the high expense.

"If researchers conclude that the only valuable records they need are those that are online they will be missing major parts of the story," said James J. Hastings, director of access programs at the National Archives. "And in some cases they will miss the story altogether."

Maritime buffs, for example, hoping to use the Internet to piece together the story of the Silenus, one of the finest ships ever built in North America, will find a spotty narrative. The papers of its captain, Joseph King, who lived a brief but adventurous life, from 1782 to 1806, can be found courtesy of the Mellon Foundation, in a digitized archive from the Mystic Seaport's collection. Researchers will see how much Captain King paid for "1 potte lijn oli" in 1803, when the ship was in the Netherlands.

What they will not see is that two years after Captain King's death, at the Cape of Good Hope, the ship itself was advertised for sale on May 4, 1808, in Calcutta. This clue remains paperbound, on the front page of The Asiatic Mirror, an English-language newspaper published in Calcutta during that era, whose only known remaining copies now reside in large bound volumes in a remote storage room outside Washington. The relative obscurity of the newspaper, and its odd size, make it impractical to digitize.

A Google search will pick up the next chapter of the story at the Princeton University's special collection, which includes the papers of James and Dolley Madison. It reveals that in 1817, President Madison signed over the ship's papers to William Gallup.

"The story of what happened to the good ship Silenus between 1806 and 1817 will never be complete," said Mr. Adamson of the Library of Congress, "but what happened in 1808 in Calcutta is the kind of little crumb that can be picked up and become a significant research item."

The ultimate fate of information relating to potentially valuable but obscure people, places, events or things like the Silenus highlights one of the paradoxes of the digital era. While the Internet boom has made information more accessible and widespread than ever, that very ubiquity also threatens records and artifacts that do not easily lend themselves to digitization — because of cost, but also because Web surfers and more devoted data hounds simply find it easier to go online than to travel far and wide to see tangible artifacts.

"This is the great problem right now, and it's a scary thing," said the documentary filmmaker Ken Burns. "The dots are only connected by a few of us who are willing to go to the places to make those connections."

In its digitization efforts, the Library of Congress is focusing mainly on special collections, hewing to a philosophy that it should be digitizing objects that cannot be seen elsewhere. There are the obvious things, like the papers of Washington, Jefferson and Lincoln. And then there are the Farm Security Administration's collection of photographs from the Depression, and a set of mounted photographs of the America's Cup yacht race since the 1890s.

Elizabeth S. Dulabahn, a senior manager at the Library of Congress who oversees part of the library's digitizing effort, said the library was examining closely the behavior of those who use its Web site.

"We're trying to do a better job of understanding the kinds of information that people are looking for on the Web, and the kinds of searches that bring users to the library's site," she said. She cited Women's History Month and the centennial of the first Wright Brothers flight as "examples of events of interest to a broad constituency."

The Library of Congress and other archives are creating indexes that refer to the contents of a physical collection, in the hope that they will entice researchers away from their computers.

But the reality remains that a new generation of researchers prefers to seek information online, a trend made all too clear to Mr. Hastings of the National Archives last year, after Google, in an experiment of sorts, digitized 101 of the National Archives' films — including World War II newsreels and NASA footage — and put them up on its site, at video.google.com/nara.html.

"Before that happened, we had 200 requests total for the whole year in our research room," Mr. Hastings said. "The first month the films were available on Google, there were about 200,000 hits on them — a thousandfold increase."

In some cases, strange bedfellows have conspired to help solve the problem.

Over the years, the New Orleans Public Library has steadily been digitizing its photographs, but its documents have gone largely untouched. The collection, which rivals the holdings of many university special collections, contains millions of historical documents, going back to 1769 and the Spanish colonial era.

The records survived Hurricane Katrina unscathed, but are still at risk for damage and loss, said Irene Wainwright, an archivist at the library.

"I can't tell you how many people have suggested to us, 'Oh, you just need to digitize all that stuff down in the basement and you'll be all right,'" Ms. Wainwright said. "They have no idea how much effort that requires."

Enter the Genealogical Society of Utah, an organization financed by the Mormon Church, for whom the search for ancestors is a core mission. The society has embarked on a three-year, $200,000 project to digitize all of the library's genealogically relevant records from 1805 to 1880 (www.familysearch.org).

"The records we gather document the lives of people," said Wayne J. Metcalfe, vice president of the society. "Births, christenings, land records and other documents that provide information about individuals who have lived on the earth."

To that end, genealogy experts affiliated with the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints are fanning out, digital cameras in hand, making copies of genealogically relevant records in 200 cities around the world, including New Orleans. Over the next five years, the church expects to have hundreds of millions of digital images available.

Mr. Metcalfe said economies of scale helped his organization bring down the cost of capturing each image to roughly 20 cents — far less than what a commercial company might charge.

Similarly, I.B.M.'s digitization efforts — dating to the mid-1990s, when the company converted a healthy chunk of the Vatican Library's archives — are done in a way to benefit the company as well as the institution looking to digitize its holdings.

"We look for projects that will highlight I.B.M.'s most innovative technologies or help us develop those technologies with very specific partners who have a problem to solve," said Paula Baker, vice president for global community initiatives at I.B.M. The company looks for projects that require the newest technology.

Such is the case with its most recent multiyear, multimillion-dollar project: a virtual version of the vast Forbidden City in Beijing, which I.B.M. is building in partnership with China's Ministry of Culture. When it is finished, early next year, the site will include interactive, three-dimensional images of ancient thrones, artwork and military implements.

Ms. Baker added that each time I.B.M. embarks on a new venture, requests start coming in from other institutions in need. "When we do these projects everyone else comes out of the woodwork," she said. "But we have to be very selective."

Donald J. Waters, program officer for scholarly communication at the Mellon Foundation, said his foundation had also become increasingly selective over the years.

By way of example, Dr. Waters pointed to the papers of Matthew Parker, the archbishop of Canterbury in the 16th century who collected ancient manuscripts to prove the early existence of an independent English-speaking church that was responsible not to the pope but to the king of England. For centuries, those papers have been locked up at Corpus Christi College at Cambridge University. Mellon is financing a project to put them online.

"It takes a special skill to select stand-alone collections that have a durable appeal in the marketplace of scholars, which is the marketplace that Mellon cares most about," Dr. Waters said. "As interesting and as important as standout collections in individual libraries and archives might be, the mere fact of digitizing them does not mean that once they are online they will attract and sustain an audience."

The Parker collection, Dr. Waters said, meets all these criteria — it is a core collection for a variety of fields: linguistics, ecclesiastical and religious history, English history, art history, medieval studies. He added, however, that the materials have a long history of restricted access, largely to protect the materials because they are so important.

"Digitization would allow much broader access to the contents," he said, "which is sufficient for much research, without exposing the physical manuscripts to added handling."

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WHILE copyright is not a concern for those digitizing documents that are hundreds of years old, copyright restrictions play a significant role when it comes to modern material. Even if the Steinbeck Center in Salinas were to find the money to digitize, say, the manuscript of "The Pearl," its copyright would limit its distribution.

"At this point, online materials are best for authors no longer under copyright," said Susan Shillinglaw, a professor of English at San Jose State University and scholar in residence at the Steinbeck Center.

When Leonard Bernstein's family donated the composer's papers to the Library of Congress in 1993, it was with the goal of digitizing portions of the collection and making them broadly accessible. Although more than a thousand items from the collection have been digitized and placed on the library's Web site, there is still an enormous quantity of material that, because of sheer volume and copyright concerns, is still accessible only to researchers who travel to the library.

For instance, the collection includes a seven-page letter that Jacqueline Kennedy wrote by hand to Bernstein at 4 a.m. on June 8, 1968, the day after the funeral for Robert F. Kennedy, thanking him for conducting Mahler's Requiem during the ceremony. The letter is an extraordinary window into her grief: "Your music was everything in my heart, of peace and pain and such drowning beauty," she wrote. But the library would need permission from the estate of Mrs. Onassis to digitize it.

When it comes to sound recordings, copyright law can introduce additional complications. Recordings made before 1972 are protected under state rather than federal laws, and under a provision of the 1976 Copyright Act, may be entitled to protection under state law until 2067. Also, an additional copyright restriction often applies to the underlying musical composition.

A study published in 2005 by the Library of Congress and the Council on Library and Information Resources found that some 84 percent of historical sound recordings spanning jazz, blues, gospel, country and classical music in the United States, and made from 1890 to 1964, have become virtually inaccessible.

"Copyright is a very blunt instrument," said Tim Brooks, the author of "Lost Sounds: Blacks and the Birth of the Recording Industry, 1890 to 1919" (University of Illinois, 2004). "Once you have copyright, you have total control; there's very little room in the copyright law even for preservation, much less reissuing material."

Generally, rights owners like Sony BMG have reissued on CD only a small portion of the recordings they control.

For example, John Philip Sousa's own band made scores of recordings for Victor Records in the early 20th century. BMG bought Victor in 1986, and few if any of those recordings have since been reissued on CD. "There is probably an odd track out somewhere," Mr. Brooks said, "but they've certainly never done any kind of retrospective of him that I'm aware of." And of the hundreds of recordings made in the same period by Noble Sissle, an African-American tenor who recorded for several labels now owned by Sony BMG, few if any have made it onto CD.

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THE result, Mr. Brooks said, is a series of gaps in the popular understanding of the nation's musical heritage. "It's as if before Bessie Smith, there was nothing," he said. "It has the effect of narrowing our own understanding of our own history."

Another factor that determines what is digitized is how straightforward it is to copy the material.

In some cases, said Theresa Salazar, curator of Western Americana at the Bancroft Library at the University of California, Berkeley, the two go hand in hand. "Agencies and organizations providing funding often want large volume for their money," Ms. Salazar said.

For example, she pointed out, objects like books can be handled in a straightforward way. It is easy to capture these materials because they are printed, and many of these titles are more or less the same size.

No one knows this better than Google, whose digitization efforts focus mainly on books.

In its quest to scan every one of the tens of millions of books ever published, Google has already digitized one million volumes. Google refuses to say how much it has spent on the venture so far, but outside experts estimate the figure at at least $5 million. The company has also been scanning and indexing academic journals to make them searchable, and is working with the Patent Office to digitize thousands of patents dating back to 1790.

David Eun, Google's vice president for content partnerships, said that rather than dwell on what is being left behind, he preferred to take a more optimistic view.

"We're talking about a huge, huge universe of content," Mr. Eun said. "If you look at the glass as half-empty it becomes too overwhelming."

Company was first to make a working prototype but, some say, late entering the market.
By BEN DOBBIN
THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

AP Kodak's latest digital camera, the EasyShare One, right, is much smaller than Sasson's prototype.

ROCHESTER, N.Y. -- Steven Sasson knew in December 1975 that his 8-pound, toaster-size contraption, which captured a black-and-white image on a digital cassette tape at a resolution of .01 megapixels, "was a little bit revolutionary."

When anyone asked, the Eastman Kodak Co. engineer ventured that it would become a commercial reality in 15 to 20 years.

It would be a quarter century, though, before Kodak began to capitalize on Sasson's breakthrough: the first digital camera.

In the meantime, the company that pioneered mass-market photography was busily amassing more than 1,000 digital-imaging patents. Today, almost all digital cameras rely on those inventions.

But Kodak's transition to the new world of photography was hindered by a reluctance to phase out celluloid film, its 20th-century gravy train.

Not until 2001 did Kodak begin selling mass-market digital cameras, though it leapfrogged Sony Corp. and Canon Inc. in 2004 for the lead in U.S. digital camera sales.

In the meantime, Sasson's fanciful alternative has gone from scientific curiosity to high-end novelty to America's most popular electronics gift, giving him unfamiliar star power late in his career and a few worries about his role in the steamroller effects of innovation.

After all, the toll of the digital-photography revolution on Kodak's work force "is enormous," he said.

"Every once in a while," the garrulous, good-natured Sasson joked, "some of my friends say they're going to put my statue up at Kodak Park" -- the mammoth but now rapidly shrinking film-manufacturing hub that George Eastman began erecting here in the late 1800s.

Sasson, now 55, never imagined as a relatively new Kodak hire in 1975 all the dazzling ingredients that have, in just a few years, put digital cameras in 50 percent of American households: fiber optics, the Internet, personal computers, home printers.

His invention began with a 30-second conversation.

Sasson, who'd recently earned a master's in electrical engineering, said his supervisor, Gareth Lloyd, gave him a "very broad assignment: He just said, 'Could we build a camera using solid-state imagers?' " -- a new type of electronic sensor known as a charge coupled device, or CCD, that gathers optical information.

Finding the literature on digital imaging to be virtually blank -- Texas Instruments Inc. had designed a filmless but analog-based electronic camera in 1972 -- Sasson drew on whatever wizardry was available: an analog-to-digital converter adapted from Motorola Inc. components, a Kodak movie-camera lens and the tiny CCD chips introduced by Fairchild Semiconductor in 1973.

He set about constructing the digital circuitry from scratch, relying on oscilloscope measurements to guide him. There were no images to look at until the entire prototype was put together.

Completing their final voltage-variation test in December 1975, Sasson and his chief technician, Jim Schueckler, persuaded a lab assistant to pose for them. The image took 23 seconds to record onto the cassette and another 23 seconds to read off a playback unit onto a television. Then it popped up on the screen.

"You could see the silhouette of her hair," Sasson said. But her face was a blur of static. "She was less than happy with the photograph and left, saying 'You need work,' " he said.

But an overjoyed Sasson already knew the solution: By simply reversing a set of wires, the assistant's face was restored.

Sasson's show-and-tell presentations over the next year "met with a lot of curiosity, some annoyance," he said. "Many times people talked about all the reasons why it would never happen. But there were many people that quietly looked at it and said, 'Boy, it's a long time, but I don't see that it won't happen.'"

When Sony marketed the first filmless camera in 1981, a Mavica that worked off magnetic disks, Sasson thought: "Exciting development, wrong approach." It was based on television technology, "which had inherent limitations in image quality," he said.

Besides, Kodak wouldn't be rushed.

Considering that Eastman's $1 Brownie camera turned photography into a hobby for the masses way back in 1900, some critics insist Kodak discovered the "next big thing" and didn't bring it out quickly enough, letting Japanese rivals drive the digital-camera market.

The story is reminiscent of one of technology's biggest fumbles: In the 1970s, Xerox Corp. researchers in Silicon Valley invented seminal aspects of personal computing that were virtually ignored by the parent company and ultimately used by others.

But Chris Chute, a photography analyst at research firm IDC in Framingham, Mass., views Kodak as an easy target because it "keeps all doors open as long as possible until the real opportunities start to shape themselves."

Unquestionably, though, Kodak's dash to transform itself into a digital heavyweight has left a painful trail: Tumbling sales of film, which still accounts for the bulk of its profits, will soon drop its global payroll below 50,000 employees from a peak of 145,300 in 1988.

While most of Sasson's career has revolved around finding ways to capture, store, transmit and manipulate digital images, he now specializes in protecting Kodak's intellectual property.

His prototype will form the root of historical arguments against Sony in an upcoming patent-infringement trial over Kodak's digital-camera inventions from 1987 to 2003.

In looking back at Kodak's long road to the digital age, Sasson doesn't believe his employer ultimately was late to the game.

"As much as other people may have introduced cameras earlier, I submit those cameras probably were not very easy to use -- or very good by image-quality standards," he said.

"The mission is the same as George Eastman's: Take this very important art and turn it into something 'as convenient as the pencil.' "