Camera Work: A Photographic Quarterly (1903 (Heft 4))

nothing to do with art, and that remembering Turner’s little drawings and
their wonderful accomplishment in the conveying of awe, mystery, atmosphere,
space, etc., I might be tempted by the Fates with an opportunity of showing
that even so small a camera could, if its user saw the right thing and knew
it to be in the right condition, accomplish something sufficiently far along
Turner's road to merit some share of the sort of applause meted out to his
drawings.
Architectural paintings, or drawings, when made professedly as pictures and
not merely as students’ drawings, mere elevations, etc., are, unless by
the most accomplished of artists, nearly always misleading—at least they are
so to me; they are rarely sufficiently convincing; they smack too much of
scene-painting; they err either by inclusion of color where color is not called
for and where it only confuses the issues and distracts the attention from the
real, the essential beauties and meanings of the scene, or they sin in over-
doing the picturesque. Just as an inferior actor in playing Shakespeare is
not content with letting his words speak for themselves, but must force the
point, must rub it in, till by excess of endeavor he fails of any real or vital
convincement. Again, detail is either too prominent or too much sacrificed;
proportions are also unduly magnified; elements that do not happen to
excite the draughtsman's fancy are too freely suppressed or minimized; often,
too, to make a more effective (?) rendering, more than one point of view is
worked from, to one’s complete bewilderment when one visits the place in
question. The real solemnities of the place, sufficiently impressive and
obvious in themselves if adequately recorded, are set aside in favor of
pretentious semblances that never fully convince even when the original is
not known to one, and still less after one has made an acquaintance with the
subject.
Of course, photography sins far worse than all this in the commercial and
the untrained amateur aspects of this work; the things one sees offered
in the very cathedral towns themselves make one almost vow never to use
a camera again, so absolutely devoid are they of every trace of artistic feeling.
My laudation of photography in this work must, to travelers who have
suffered from these shop-window things, seem the most biased and misleading
of utterances. But those who have noted the advances photography has
made in architectural work during the last ten years, as evidenced by our
best exhibition-walls, will, I think, agree with me that some of the most
encouraging progress in an art sense that the camera-man has made has been
in this direction. Trained taste in choice of subject; working knowledge of
the limitations in the use of lenses; sensitive feeling in light and shadow;
delicate sense of atmosphere; enjoyment of the grandeur of masses; all these
conditions have been, I will not say completely mastered, but they have been
well studied and exhibited.
One charm and advantage that a really artistic photograph of a cathedral
interior has over a drawing or painting is that it is so evidently true to
the original subject; one does not instinctively feel inclined to ask, how
much of this effect is due to the particular vision or translation of the

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