Ripley, Caravaggio, and Pentax

Relishing the guilty pleasures of film noir, Baroque art, and black and white photography

Caravaggio’s The Calling of Saint Matthew (1599–1600), Contarelli Chapel, San Luigi dei Francesi, Rome

Last night I finished watching the eighth and final episode of Ripley, the new Netflix series that has been turning heads since it made its debut on April 4. In case you’ve missed all the hoopla, we’re talking about a smart and stylish new adaptation of Patricia Highsmith’s 1955 The Talented Mr. Ripley, a crime/suspense novel so tightly wound that it’s deliciously claustrophobic.

In the story, Tom Ripley is a no-account young New York City con man who is approached by a successful businessman to go to Italy, find the rich man’s wayward son, Dickie Greenleaf, and convince him to come back home. Ripley plays right along with the older man’s mistaken belief that the two young men were close friends at Princeton, and heads off to Europe with lots of cash in his pocket and a firm desire to join the 0.1 percenters of the world aboard their yachts and in their posh Venetian apartments.

From that beginning, Highsmith’s novel spins a tense, dark and creepy tale of grift, deception and murder that remains a classic today, having been made into two movies — Purple Noon, starring Alain Delon, in 1960, and The Talented Mr. Ripley, with Matt Damon in the lead, in 1999.

This new venture, starring Andrew Scott as Ripley, is the best, so perfectly constructed and sumptuously beautiful that it’s just screaming Oscar. The photography is gorgeous, and Scott is masterful at stringing out the metastasizing creepiness in just about every scene.

But the big deal for me — and the reason I’m writing about it here on Paint and Photography — is that this new Ripley is shot entirely in black and white. Every scene looks like a work of art, with luscious tonality, intriguing composition and arts world allusions across the board.

Andrew Scott in Ripley

Director Steven Zaillian and cinematographer Robert Elswit use monochrome photography to evoke the visual devices of mid 20th century film noir classics, from street lights reflecting off pavement in the rain to faces half hidden in shadow, à la Caravaggio, himself another student of the darkness of the human soul.

The swaggering Roman painter once under a death sentence for killing a man in a bar brawl, Caravaggio is himself practically a character in this version of Ripley, as the camera regularly shares with the viewer loving glimpses of the Baroque master’s dark imagery.

So what’s all this got to do with Pentax, the best little camera brand you’ve probably never heard of? The strangely philosophical Japanese camera company, which has been making fine lenses for more than a century and is now owned by Ricoh, has been selling the perfect cameras for landscape photographers like me for years. Besides creating beautiful photos and being fun to shoot with, they’re reasonable in price, compact, light weight, tough as nails, and so water resistant I have cleaned mud off mine under the kitchen faucet.

Ricoh pretty much bet the farm on its latest Pentax camera — a high-end digital single lens reflex, the K-3 Mark III — that was released after all the other companies such as Nikon and Canon had quit making SLRs and switched entirely to mirrorless. Ricoh/Pentax was already swimming against the tide by ignoring the mirrorless craze last year when it doubled down and released a black and white-only version of the K-3.

A camera that shoots only black and white photos? Who’s going to buy that? When the K-3 Mark III Monochrome came out last year, reviewers gushed about how quaintly wonderful and nostalgic it was for photography, but warned that no one in their right mind would ever actually buy it, considering the $2,200 price tag.

My (already well worn) Pentax K-3-III (not, alas, the Monochrome)

So much for online expertise. The K-3 Mono bodies flew off the shelves before the shelves were even stocked, and for months after it was released the camera was on perpetual back order in all the usual places people buy good photo gear. Pentax successfully invaded the high-end niche camera market — fine quality cameras that shoot only in black and white — that had been created and was owned entirely by Leica, the only other maker of black and white-only digital cameras. The Leica monochrome bodies cost a breathtaking $6,000 to $9,000, making the Pentax Mono a deal after all.

I confess, I rented a Pentax K-3-III Mono for a week last year and haven’t yet gotten over the experience. It’s a great camera that is capable of exquisite black and white images and, in the process, makes photography fun again. Unfortunately, Pentax hasn’t yet seen fit to drop its price to something that feels more affordable, so I’m still shooting my black and white work in color and converting to monochrome in the computer.

All this whirled in my mind over the past week as I was watching Ripley. The depth and beauty of the series’ black and white photography has left me wanting to shoot more and more black and white images myself.

It also left me certain that if Caravaggio were somehow able to buy himself a camera, he would choose a Pentax K-3 Mark III Monochrome. It can create high-quality images in the darkness of back alleys and sleazy taverns, and it’s also tough enough to serve as a weapon when those bar fights get out of hand. Caravaggio would have loved it.