Camera Work: A Photographic Quarterly (1903 (Heft 2))

EDUARD J. STEICHEN’SWORK.—AN APPRECIATION.
PAINTER AS well as photographer, and, what is more, an artist,
Eduard J. Steichen, young as he is, has influenced pictorial
photography extraordinarily. He has enlarged its horizon for
photographers, compelled attention from the painters, amazed and
delighted connoisseurs.
THE painters recognize in his prints the motive, feeling, and something
of the methods of the painter, which accounts for their approval. They
include a great deal more; but, for the present, let us consider this aspect.
APPRENTICED early to a firm of commercial lithographers, he gained a
facility in draughtsmanship and escaped the deterioration to which many an
ardent young fellow is reduced by that business. On the contrary, it stirred
in him a spirit of revolt, so that his nature rebounded to a passionate love
for the very opposites of that which his daily toil demanded. From nig-
gardliness of detail his ideal swung to breadth, from gaudy colors to delicate
tonalities, and from the commonplace of uniform and unsuggestive lighting
to the subtleties of chiaroscuro.
NOW, these are all distinctly painter-like qualities, and probably the reason
that they appear so conspicuously in his photographic work is because he is
at the same time applying them to his work in oil. The simultaneous
practice in the two mediums has broadened the scope of his experience and
established his experiments on a surer basis; so that while one may detect
the experimental feeling in much of his work, it is without the faltering and
inconclusiveness which distinguish the efforts of so many photographers.
This again is a feature of Mr. Steichen’s work which appeals to the painters,
who recognize in it the results of a training in art such as they themselves
have received; whereas many photographers merely know the jargon of the
studio and have not undergone its discipline. His experience in oil-
painting, moreover, has thrown a very valuable sidelight upon his photo-
graphic work.
I MEAN in the way of motive and in the realization of a possibility dis-
tinctively inherent in photography. The artist is confronted with the
necessity of simplifying his subject; of selecting some facts as essential and
rejecting others as likely, if introduced, to confuse the main issue. If he is
working in water-colors or oils the simplification is rendered more diflicult
by the variety of hues, as well as by the discriminations of tone in those
hues. But this difficulty can be eliminated in photography, which trans-
lates the confusion of color into the relative simplicity of graduated blacks
and whites—or shall we call it darks and lights ? For colors in nature are
but the differences of reflected light, and the shadows only the diminishing,
in a greater or less degree, of luminosity.
SO, if we look at photography from this point of view, we come upon a
surprise. Whereas, the charge against the camera has been that it sees too
indiscriminately and in detail, it would appear that it is capable of reaching
a certain simplification more readily than the painter can. This is really a