“Warwick, New York” (1982) can serve as the exemplum for much of the work in “Philip Perkis: The Sadness of Men,” currently at the Alan Klotz Gallery. The exhibition consists of 32 black-and-white photographs from a recently published book of the same name, and 16 more taken this year and last. Although these include several shots in New York City, and some from Jerusalem, Cairo, Mexico City, and other points abroad, the 1982 picture from Warwick is a classic instance of Mr. Perkis’s landscapes and rural images.

Warwick, N.Y., is 42 straight-line miles northwest of New York City. It is a place where country folk grow food to feed the city, and city folk have second homes. “Warwick, New York” is a very simple photograph. The foreground is a short slope covered with wild grasses and shrubs. At the top of the slope, running across the middle of the image and slanting up slightly to the left, is the edge of a field of corn, angled so that the stalks are seen in profile. The sky above the field is dark with undefined cloud cover. Just to the right of center, at the point where the slope and the field meet, is a not very big tree. The atmosphere is dark.

Why is this picture so satisfying? First is the modesty of its subject. It is about nature, but not the purple mountain majesties of Ansel Adams. Mr. Perkis treats the simple cornfield with the respect that seems appropriate, without straining for awe or some grander effect. Second is the modesty of its ambition. There is some social content in that the corn was planted by farmers, and probably the tree as well, but there is no environmental lecturing as in Robert Adams’s pieces. Mr. Perkis is not intent here on teaching us anything, but on rendering in silver his pleasure at standing by the side of a road and seeing the corn, the tree, and the sky. The picture is about his delight in composition, and the contrasting textures of the shrubs and grass and corn and sky. It is about a tree, although not a very big tree, that sticks up above the corn and is silhouetted against the sky. If there is something less than awe here, there is still a silent wonder.

This is not an accident. Mr. Perkis has been taking photographs for more than 50 years, ever since the mid-1950s, when he served in the Air Force as the tail gunner of a B-36. Although his photographs are in many museum and private collections, “The Sadness of Men” is the first in-depth selection of his work to be published. He may, in fact, be better known for “Teaching Photography: Notes Assembled,” a book based on his 40 years as an instructor at the Pratt Institute, the School of Visual Arts, and the Tisch School of the Arts at NYU. The first edition of “Teaching Photography” came out in 2001 and went through three printings. A second edition of the slim volume is extending his influence beyond those he taught in person. He enjoins them “Not to name, label, evaluate, like, hate: no memory or desire. Just to see.”

This vaguely New Age mysticism is better seen on the walls than read in print. In “Saint Lawrence Seaway, Quebec” (2003), a low tide has exposed shoals that barely rise above the water, and rocks that register as random polka dots in a vista that stretches to an imperceptible horizon where the gray water merges with the gray sky. In “New Mexico” (2004), it is an almost featureless hill of white sand and white scrub that extends away to a higher, darker hill in the distance: Two metal stakes, one on either side of the picture, are the only man-made objects visible, and they serve no apparent purpose. In “Unionville, New York” (2002), a weak light from a break in the overhanging clouds dimly shows a winter scene of snow cover, reeds, and distant trees.

Mr. Perkis can be equally affecting away from nature. “Belly Dancing Studio, New York City” (1998) shows just a light fixture with two bare fluorescent tubes and a piece of flimsy material with a single star attached hanging from the ceiling. There are more fluorescent tubes in a store in “Guadalajara, Mexico” (1994), and kitschy putti wrapped in cellophane hanging from the ceiling there, along with a mass-produced Jesus on a cross. Maybe the most complex picture is “New York City” (1999), which I read as a picture of a young man in the fitting room of a formals rental store trying on a tuxedo to wear at his wedding. Some of his friends are with him, and a man who may be his father, doubly happy because we see him again in a mirror. Someone is taking a picture. The tilt of the frame is perfect for the high-spirited but casual intimacy of its subject.

Henry David Thoreau, in “A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers,” quotes the Indian poet Calidas: “Perhaps the sadness of men on seeing beautiful forms and hearing sweet music arises from some faint remembrance of past joys, and the traces of connections in a former state of existence.” Calidas wrote 2,000 years ago in Sanskrit, but what unites him to Thoreau, who wrote his book as an extended eulogy for his brother, and to Mr. Perkis in his decades of wandering with his camera, is a hankering for transcendence. Mr. Perkis has a sentence fragment in “Teaching Photography”: “To experience the meaning of what is.” The pictures at the Klotz Gallery show how hard he tried, and is still trying.

wmeyers@nysun.com

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