Camera Work: A Photographic Quarterly (1907 (Heft 18))

channel will allow themselves to be influenced, but we are ready to wager
that the French school of pictorial photography will remain what it has
been since its debut: independent and daring, severe as to results, indifferent
as to the way in which they may have been obtained. Robert Demachy.
MR. GEORGE BERNARD SHAW ON THE FOREGOING ARTICLE.
This outburst of our friend Demachy is pure lese-photography. What
is all this about “ the photographic character being an anti-artistic character ? ”
About “ methods of art which are incontestably superior to photography ? ”
Name those methods. What are they? I deny their existence. I affirm
the enormous superiority of photography to every other known method of
graphic art that aims at depicting the aspects and moods of nature in mono-
chrome. I say that a photographer imitating the work of a draughtsman is
like a man imitating the noises of a barnyard; he may do it very cleverly,
but it is an unpardonable condescension all the same. Also, he is substituting
an easy, limited, and exhausted process for a difficult one which has never
yet been pushed to the limit of its possibilities. He fails in respect for his
art. He is a traitor in the photographic camp. lf he really prefers the old
methods, let him practice them in the old way, and leave the genuine old-
fashioned mark of the human finger and thumb on his copies of nature;
for the camera will never catch the true flavor of that quaint bungling; and
even if it could, humanity would rightly refuse to concede to it that allow-
ance which we make so willingly for the infirmity of the painter's hand, and
the clumsiness of his medium. We can stand things from Corot that we
would not stand for a moment from Demachy.
The old photography was never half so mechanical as the best painting
necessarily is. What Demachy really means is that it was — as it still is —
largely practiced as a commercial process by men who were not artists. Also
that a certain set of them admired one another, exhibited one another’s
pictures, awarded one another medals, and sometimes wore velveteen jackets,
and stopped getting their hair cut. They did not know that Ruskin and
Rossetti were keenly interested in photography, and practiced it. They
probably never heard of Ruskin and Rossetti. They provoked a reaction
in which, as usual, the baby was emptied out with the bath, and the qualities
of silver prints and the merit of clean workmanship were called inartistic
because the school with which they were associated was inartistic. There
are still people who think that platinotype is artistic, and albumenized paper
inartistic; that under-exposed metol-developed plates are artistic, and
“plucky” negatives inartistic; worst of all that a print which shows that
the photographer is a connoisseur of the Barbizon school is artistic, and a
print which might have been made by a man who never saw a picture in his
life, inartistic. The counter-reaction is just as foolish; and Demachy is
right to warn us against the danger of a brainless inversion of these proposi-
tions. But such oscillations are inevitable. Demachy’s own work, showing
as it did the enormous value to a photographer of a complete and sensitive
connoisseurship in modern art, led several French and American photographers

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