Camera Work: A Photographic Quarterly (1903 (Heft 3))

LESSONS FROM THE OLD MASTERS.—II.

Americans, at this stage of their development in matters pertaining to
art, are appreciative of that which is descriptive of form, and are capable of
grasping effects rendered in black and white. As a people they have not
yet been prepared by education or mental qualification for the subtler
expressions found in color.
The photograph for these reasons is within the comprehension of the
masses, while the easel-picture and the mural painting are quite removed.
Yet when the photographer’s desire for some knowledge of the principles
of art reaches the point at which he begins to cast about him for a school in
which to pursue his study, he is at once confronted by the fact that no art-
school directors have regarded photography seriously enough to adapt their
art-courses to the needs of the worker with the camera. Neither National
nor State Photographers' Associations have taken official measures to build
up for their large membership a system for the study of the principles of
composition, upon which art-photography must chiefly depend for a healthy
start and subsequent growth; nor have camera clubs throughout America
done aught to establish such a school.
That art is structureless seems the convenient belief; so soothing is it
to regard one’s neighbor’s work as no better, or even less good, than one’s
own; so easy is it to evoke pleasing comment upon photo-prints that
render commonplace scenes in the old conventional photographic way. Yet
there is in man a thirst for the pictorial expression of thought that the
mere technical photograph can not quench, and it is belief in the power of
photography to record the worker even better than the scene that induces
this longing for art-study on the part of many in the profession. And
it is well to entertain such belief; for the photographer’s methods are far
more pliable than is generally conceded and once given methods capable
of being bent to the thought of the worker, we have at hand the possibility
of art; its realization being dependent only upon individual will and ability.
That photography can be an art is no longer questioned, but in order to
achieve it we must strive to encourage the forces, everywhere visible, that
make for good, to give direction to our endeavors and to unite them in a
unifying art impulse making for art-structure and art-principles.
Photographers may assume that the validity of the truth, revealed by
ages of art-study—that composition is the very foundation of picture-making
is applicable to them, too, and that there is no escape from a study of it if
it is their desire to raise their work to the level of art. It may be that
gifted men, surrounded by works of art from which they unconsciously
draw conclusions, formulate for themselves ideas that enable them to put
together the essentials of a picture without being conscious of following
any prescribed system of procedure, but it is also true that those with but
little talent and few opportunities to see masterpieces will learn to think only
after a system has been given them. Without exception the masses of
children that attend our public schools are working at a study of art under

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