DOI Artikel:
Dallett Fuguet, Notes by the Way: The Man Behind the Camera
DOI Seite / Zitierlink: https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.29979#0068
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NOTES BY THE WAY.
THE MAN BEHIND THE CAMERA.
IN OUR preceding number there was a capital article on “ Repetition
With Slight Variation,” which tells how this characteristic of Japanese
art lately has been applied in many forms of occidental art.
A SOMEWHAT similar idea of repetition with slight variation is
also one of the beauties of old work of the arts and crafts. Some of
this variation may have been unintentional, but medieval work abounds in
beautiful examples of purposeful and loving variations, mainly of details.
This is one reason why antique work is so much more pleasing to an artistic
mind than the deadly regularity, as well as bad taste, developed in the
century just completed. With the perfecting of the scroll-saw, the turning-
lathe, and such kinds of clever machinery, came an orgy of Philistinism,
when nearly every one and everything was degraded to ideals of machine
standards, just as photography was kept in the highways of the commonplace,
because it also was a new invention that enabled the Philistine to produce in
commercial quantities.
A MACHINE can not make purposeful variations; that can be done only
by a rational being whose heart is in his work to ensure its greater beauty
and perfection. Recognition of this fact spreads slowly, but it is spreading,
and more and more widely the workman in the future will be exalted above
all machines. If it were not for this growing opposition of art to the
merely mechanical, we might despair lest we turn into a machine-run race,
not only politically, but in all ways—" ready-made,, from our shoes to our
ideas. But as we learn more and more, we grow to like, we aim to do,
consciously, what our forefathers did with little thought—almost instinctively,
we might say. And in the end, our conscious way will prove the better and
more permanent.
PHOTOGRAPHY, or rather, some photographers, have broken away
from mechanical ideals to follow the lead and laws of art. The modern
high-power, quick-firing gun is a most wonderful machine; but it is already
a truism throughout our country that it is the man behind the gun that
counts. When like recognition is fully accorded to the man behind the
camera, perhaps he may dare to hope for sympathetic comprehension if he
attempt repetition with slight variation, even in composition, as well as
practice it, as he now does in minor details. Dallet Fuguet.
52
THE MAN BEHIND THE CAMERA.
IN OUR preceding number there was a capital article on “ Repetition
With Slight Variation,” which tells how this characteristic of Japanese
art lately has been applied in many forms of occidental art.
A SOMEWHAT similar idea of repetition with slight variation is
also one of the beauties of old work of the arts and crafts. Some of
this variation may have been unintentional, but medieval work abounds in
beautiful examples of purposeful and loving variations, mainly of details.
This is one reason why antique work is so much more pleasing to an artistic
mind than the deadly regularity, as well as bad taste, developed in the
century just completed. With the perfecting of the scroll-saw, the turning-
lathe, and such kinds of clever machinery, came an orgy of Philistinism,
when nearly every one and everything was degraded to ideals of machine
standards, just as photography was kept in the highways of the commonplace,
because it also was a new invention that enabled the Philistine to produce in
commercial quantities.
A MACHINE can not make purposeful variations; that can be done only
by a rational being whose heart is in his work to ensure its greater beauty
and perfection. Recognition of this fact spreads slowly, but it is spreading,
and more and more widely the workman in the future will be exalted above
all machines. If it were not for this growing opposition of art to the
merely mechanical, we might despair lest we turn into a machine-run race,
not only politically, but in all ways—" ready-made,, from our shoes to our
ideas. But as we learn more and more, we grow to like, we aim to do,
consciously, what our forefathers did with little thought—almost instinctively,
we might say. And in the end, our conscious way will prove the better and
more permanent.
PHOTOGRAPHY, or rather, some photographers, have broken away
from mechanical ideals to follow the lead and laws of art. The modern
high-power, quick-firing gun is a most wonderful machine; but it is already
a truism throughout our country that it is the man behind the gun that
counts. When like recognition is fully accorded to the man behind the
camera, perhaps he may dare to hope for sympathetic comprehension if he
attempt repetition with slight variation, even in composition, as well as
practice it, as he now does in minor details. Dallet Fuguet.
52
