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

But please understand I don’t hold them up as models to follow: merely as
samples of the plan’s latent possibilities.
And when I speak of silhouette landscapes, I do not necessarily mean
absolute blacks and absolute whites. Intermediate grays, and even detail of
sorts, may occasionally be used with effect. To tell the truth, I find these
intermediate grays uncommonly hard to get rid of. But unquestionably they
ought to be suppressed as far as possible. The really strong design-silhouette
would contain only black and white—no grays at all—of that I am convinced.
“What would be the use of such a picture?” I think I hear some
practical person asking.
What is the use of any picture, after all ? Why, merely to be beautiful,
and therefore to give pleasure to those who love beauty. As a matter of
fact, though, these silhouettes which I suggest might be of far more practical
value than any sort of photograph (except, of course, a scientific one, or a
book or artistic illustration). They would make initial-letter designs, chapter-
headings and -endings, titles, book-covers, book-plates, magazine-covers,
catalogue-covers, panels, dados, and a host of other things, not excluding
posters themselves.
A silhouette photograph does not necessarily represent a night-scene —
it is scarcely necessary to say that. Generally, it represents a sort of no-time
design, neither of light nor darkness. But it may also be distinctively day
or distinctively night. Truth to tell, one gets one’s best ideas for silhouettes
at night. A walk on a moonlight or bright starlight night shows tree and
branch traceries, the outlines of buildings, and so on, that the eye would
fail to observe during the daytime. Often I have noticed some lovely bush
at night and been disappointed when I saw it fully lighted in the morning.
But if on your night-stroll you detect an outline form of any kind which
you think would make a picture, then there is no reason why you shouldn’t
get it with your camera next day; for though to the eye it has lost its
detailless blackness which last night was so attractive, this may be regained
on the plate by extreme under-exposure and in-front-of-the-lens illumination.
I have none of the old-fashioned photographic prejudice against
"moonlight scenes” taken in sunlight. The question which I ask myself
is this: What did the artist wish to represent ? not, What was in front of
his camera when he took the view? The test of a picture consists in its
appearance when finished rather than in the mode of its production.
Which, after all, is indirectly bringing us back to the truth-to-nature quarrel.
Moonlight, I fancy, will turn out to be one of the photographic
designer’sbiggest fields. There is something about moonlight which never
fails to touch a sympathetic chord in every mind, however blasé. Moonlight
in a wood, with solemn tree-trunks fretted against the ghostly light, moon-
light on a river, or behind church-spires, or on the Alps — these are a few
pictures which will at once rise to the mind.
Needless to say, all these could be suggested with the aid of sun-
light and careful under-exposure. Until Dr. Grün perfects his wonderful
liquid lens, we shall be unable actually to make negatives of our moonlight