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

Allowance must of course be made for the quickening of our critical attitude: for
higher ideals and loftier motives are being sought, and the growing discernment
of the worker implies an expectation of correspondingly big and subtle work.
THE aim of the pictorial worker should be directed toward cultivating the
imagination and the faculty of independent expression. In photography, as
in other spheres of thought and action, the thing most needed is not so
much exactness of technique—for that is an academic acquirement, readily
learned by studious application—as the search for the idea and the cultiva-
tion of the individuality. Beauty of line and of color, and harmony of
values, are desirable, and a thing often done before, but now well done, and
with new grace and inspiration, commands our interest; but the worker who
plans a new interpretation, who reveals a new mystery, does more than that:
he commands our admiration.
S. L. Willard.

PHOTO-SECESSION NOTES.
IN response to urgent invitations from the managements of the Minneapolis
Salon, Denver Salon, Cleveland Camera Club Salon, Rochester Camera Club
Exhibition, Toronto Camera Club Salon (in America), and the important
International Exhibition of Pictorial Portrait Photographs at the Art
Galleries of Wiesbaden (in Europe), that the Photo-Secession should support
them by an exhibit of the work of its members, the Council, having first
satisfied itself of the earnestness of purpose of these bodies and their willing-
ness to accept the terms upon which the Photo-Secession feels it necessary to
insist, prepared loan collections of Photo-Secession work to be sent to these
places. It is the policy of the Photo-Secession to exhibit only upon invita-
tion, and this necessarily implies that its exhibit must be hung as a unit and
its entirety, without submission to any jury. In following out this plan it
has been the aim of the Council to prepare collections most suitable for the
locality in which they are to be shown, varying greatly in size, but the best
of their kind procurable at the time from the work of its members. Nor
has it been the policy of the Photo-Secession to support only exhibitions of
prime importance, but rather to encourage the smaller organizations that
have evinced an intention to take photography in all seriousness. As a
body the Photo-Secession believes in extending aid and encouragement to
all those having the welfare of the cause at heart. That the organizations to
whose exhibitions the Photo-Secession has contributed have seriously desired
and appreciated its aid is shown by the fact that the place of honor has been
accorded to these loan collections; which, together with the appreciative
press notices, further emphasize the intrinsic merit of the collections that
were sent, as well as the thought bestowed upon their selection by the
Council. The more important reviews of such exhibitions will from time to
time be reprinted in these pages.
MARY M. DEVENS, Alvin Langdon Coburn, both of Boston; Wm. B.
Post, of Fryeburg, Me., and W. L. Willard, of Chicago, have recently been
elected Fellows of the Photo-Secession.

50