Between Science and Art
By George Cassidy Payne
In the mid-1980s, while Kodak was still synonymous with film and chemical processes, one of its own innovators was quietly imagining a different future. He pictured a world defined not by darkrooms, negatives, and emulsions, but by pixels, screens, and creative possibility. That innovator was Peter Sucy, a visual communicator whose career spans more than five decades of photography, digital imaging, and 3D visualization.
For most people working at Kodak in those years, photography was still the craft of chemistry. For Sucy, it was already becoming something else, something computational and even sculptural. His career tells a story not only of technological transition but also of how imagination can reshape the very way we see.
A Mouse, A Spark
“You’ve been exploring photography, digital imaging, and 3D visualization for over 50 years. Thinking back, what first pulled you in?” I asked.
His answer traces back to 1980, during a visit to the Film Board of Canada, where he witnessed one of the earliest computer animations. “I decided then I wanted a computer,” he recalls. At the time, Sucy was experimenting with cameras and traditional forms of image-making, but the glimpse of digital opened a new horizon.
By 1984, with the introduction of the Macintosh, he was searching for the right machine. One day, he wandered into an Apple store on Rochester’s Monroe Avenue. “There was a guy who said, ‘There is this other computer you may consider.’ He showed me the mouse — and that was it.”
The mouse was more than a device; it was liberation. Sucy lives with fibromyalgia, which made traditional drawing and painting difficult. “The mouse didn’t require me to hold something tightly, and I could do it without fatigue. It enabled me to take the things from my mind and put them on screen.” That single moment of encounter would change the trajectory of his life and, in its own way, help change the future of photography. (The reason the guy might have been hesitant to show Sucy the Macintosh system is because it was several times the price of a comparable PC system. It was a considerable layout of almost $3700 in 1984 dollars. Sucy took out a loan to pay for it. He says “It was a gamble.”)
Digital in a World of Film
Sucy’s early work at Kodak positioned him at the vanguard of a revolution the company itself struggled to embrace. In 1989, he designed the first Photoshop export module for a digital printer. He authored a key patent for previewing images in digital cameras. He drafted some of Kodak’s first digital strategy proposals.
After he did a print quality test comparing digital output to analog video, Sucy knew in his gut that Kodak’s Still Video System wasn’t going to make it past Gen 1. “Digital was far superior to any other analog video medium,” he recalls. “Still, if they did decide to go ahead with an analog Gen 2, there were a lot of things that could have been done better. Hence, the Gen 2 Common Platform proposal. I continued to draft digital proposals at the same time.”
At the time, Sucy was still a technician, despite holding a BFA in photography. Because his degree wasn’t a BS, he wasn’t eligible for a professional rating — even though he had taken nearly all the same classes. That technical classification carried limits. “Technicians weren’t allowed to write patents,” he explains. “I had to pick an engineer to be on my patent because of the rules, even though I was doing engineer-level work as a technician from 1986 to 1991.”
Yet Sucy remembers those years as lonely. “It was pretty lonely pushing digital proposals the first few years,” he admits. “But by 1987, I had found a sympathetic ear in Steve Sasson. He began to add his name to my papers, which carried a lot of weight with management.”
Sasson, of course, had invented the digital camera in 1975, though he was not free to discuss it widely. “I didn’t discover that Steve Sasson had invented the digital camera ten years earlier until near the end of our time working together. It never came up, probably because he wasn’t supposed to talk about it. I knew only that he was the camera group manager for the Still Video Floppy camera and was also working on a secret project for the government, the first digital camera to be sold by Kodak. (Sucy notes that one version of his cameras was an infrared version used for surveillance and spotting marijuana plants from the air.)
The irony is striking. Sucy was advocating for digital photography within Kodak, while unknowingly working beside the man who had already brought it into being. Both men were pushing against corporate inertia, trying to steer an elephant by the tail.
A Family Legacy at Kodak
Sucy’s ties to Kodak ran deep. His father, a photographic educator, established the company’s Marketing Education Center in 1970. As a college student, Sucy worked there on the 5:15 pm to 1:15 am janitorial shift, helping pay his way through school. Later, in 1991, he returned as an instructor for Professional Photography, and near the end of his career, he worked again with Quality Assurance.
That same year, he was finally promoted to a professional rating. He became Professional Photography’s first digital photography instructor after suggesting the founding of a digital photography lab with the Maine Photographic Workshops. Instead, Kodak executive Ray DeMoulin created a separate school called the Center for Creative Imaging — and, controversially, took the Workshops’ secretary and mailing list. Sucy was slated to teach there, but Mark Henry, the new director, advised him not to come due to management turmoil. “You can read more about that on my website,” Sucy notes, “Kodak’s Peyton Place.”
Betting on the Personal Computer
At Kodak, skepticism about computers was everywhere. “A lot of engineers would tell me that the PC was a toy, that it would never be a serious machine,” Sucy recalls. But he saw the Macintosh differently. “I kept saying the Mac is going to take over. I was betting on the personal computer taking off, and I was right.”
That conviction — that technology could empower artists rather than diminish them — would become a throughline in his career. Even when Kodak clung to film, Sucy was scanning his own photographs at home, experimenting with tonal curves and contrast, seeing firsthand that the darkroom was being replaced by software. “There is so much more you can do to an image digitally than you can in a darkroom, and it is much easier. Now I have a tool: I can just edit the curve in a particular region of a photograph to get the tonal separation that I want.”
Between Technology and Art
When asked how he sees the relationship between technology and art, Sucy doesn’t hesitate: “Somewhere in between. Technology is instrumental to my art.” His work often drifts fluidly between 2D and 3D, between flat photographic image and sculptural object.
In the mid-1990s, Kodak launched a new division called Dynamic Imaging. Sucy’s work there focused on 3D lenticular imaging, a technology that allowed still images to appear in depth, almost holographic. “I thought we could move it more mainstream than it has,” he admits. But the experiments left their mark.
His projects included collaborations with Disney — animated greeting cards, lenticular picture frames for tourists at Disney World — works that blurred the line between photography, optical illusion, and popular culture. “It was all about experimenting with perception and seeing how technology could bring a sense of wonder to images.”
For Sucy, the lens was never just about documentation. It was about the malleability of vision itself.
But his years at Kodak were not without turbulence. “During my career I was threatened with firings at least twice and a lawsuit once,” he recalls. His resilience, however, was as much a part of his story as the technologies he championed.
Memory, Place, and Perception
Not all of Sucy’s work is about technology. Much of it is rooted in memory. His Virtual Visions series, for example, reimagines childhood impressions and formative experiences. “A lot of my Virtual Visions series is based on memories, images from my past, probably glorified,” he says. Works like Waiting for Dad and My World at 9 Months reconstruct his earliest memories of his parents’ apartment in Maine.
“Maine is my home,” he reflects. “I grew up here in Rochester, but I spent a lot of summers in Maine, and I went back as an adult every year. It is my favorite place to photograph. I think it is one of the most beautiful states.”
For Sucy, Maine’s landscapes — the granite coastlines, pine forests, and shifting Atlantic light — anchor his artistic vision. They serve as reminders that technology, however advanced, always begins with perception, with the lived experience of seeing.
The Tactile Future
In recent years, Sucy has turned to additive printing and 3D capture, exploring what happens when digital ideas can be touched. “It is more like sculpting,” he explains. “I can play with textures, different forms, tiles, mosaics, patterns. I have created a chess set, built a gun that shoots candy hearts.”
These whimsical objects may not generate revenue — “I haven’t found 3D printing to be a particularly successful business,” he concedes — but they reflect his restless curiosity. “I like creating, and I will do it anyway. A lot of times I start with geometric forms, replicate them to make patterns, create textures, tubes and cylinders, pyramids. I don’t always go in with an idea of what it will be; I call them experiments.”
This experimental spirit connects him with a lineage of photographic artists who have pushed the medium toward new materialities — Man Ray with photograms, Moholy-Nagy with light experiments, the conceptual photographers of the 1970s and ’80s. Like them, Sucy sees photography less as a static form than as a shifting arena for inquiry.
But by 2001, Sucy’s fibromyalgia pain and fatigue had grown so severe that he could no longer make it through a work week. He took a buyout two years shy of retirement. With Kodak’s Dynamic Imaging division shuttered, he and a colleague launched a new business, Zaxys Depth & Motion Imaging, creating lenticular images for advertising. Their first day of business was September 11, 2001. The timing proved devastating. “Lenticular became too expensive for advertisers to risk it at the time.”
Immersion and AI
Looking forward, Sucy is captivated by immersive technologies and AI-driven artmaking. “3D display technology — holographic images — excites me,” he says. He envisions virtual galleries where people can walk through images, and 360-degree digital landscapes where those unable to travel might still experience the awe of national parks.
AI, too, has become part of his toolbox. “The ability to type in a description and spit out a bunch of iterations is pretty neat. I’ve played around with it, using Bloom to modify my 3D rendered images. I haven’t found it entirely bug-proof, I ended up creating five or six different renderings and picking from those. But it’s opening new creative doors.”
For Sucy, these tools don’t diminish human creativity, they expand it. They make visible what was once only imaginable.
Shaping Reality
Ultimately, Sucy sees photography as more than recording. It is, in his words, a way of shaping reality. “Photography captures light, moments, and perspectives, but it also captures time. And it has the potential to shape reality itself. What you can envision in your mind can be made real.”
From lenticular prints to additive sculptures to AI-assisted imagery, Sucy’s work sits at the crossroads of art and technology. It testifies to what can happen when imagination refuses to be confined by either chemistry or code.
In a world where new tools arrive faster than we can understand them, Peter Sucy’s career reminds us that innovation is most powerful when guided by curiosity, memory, and a humanistic vision. He doesn’t just capture images, he captures possibility. And in doing so, he invites us to see not just what is, but what might be.
George Cassidy Payne is a freelance journalist, poet, and philosophy educator whose work explores the intersections of politics, art, culture, and social justice.
