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

IS IT WELL?
IT HAS been said by one of America's greatest writers that “The artist
must employ the symbols in use in his day and nation to convey his
enlarged sense to his fellow-men; thus the new in art is always formed out
of the old” If this be true, how stands photography by the same measure?
Whilst the jibes and ridicule of the unappreciative majority matter not, yet
no good purpose is served by wantonly provoking them, and I wonder
sometimes if the modern advanced pictorial photographer is not somewhat
to be blamed for as much intolerance on the one hand as is shown on the
other hand by those whom he stigmatizes as Philistine. Granted that his
work appeals to his fellows and his sympathizers, what can it possibly mean
to the majority? I have, of course, in mind that description of photography
to the advancement of which Camera Work is largely devoted. The last
number of Camera Work is open before me; its predecessor is at my elbow;
I linger over the beautiful productions of Steichen's wonderful work, but I
ask myself if the whole movement is not a little selfish. I am thinking of
the last London Salon, when the so-called American School was so finely
represented, and I am already looking forward to the next Salon and hope
that again American work will be strongly in evidence. For fear of mis-
interpretation, I want at the outset to make it very clear that personally the
newer flights of American and French photography are full of meaning and
very refreshing; but then I ask myself if one’s condition should be such as
to need such refreshment and so without the slightest desire that any worker
"should play to the gallery,” and without thought of obstructing honest
endeavor to escape from conventionality, I can not but feel a little sympathy
for the average visitor to the Picture Gallery, and for the ordinary but
cultured man to whom such work conveys no message, and concerning
which he asks, " What does it mean?” This may savor of heresy, and
seem out of place in these pages, but I hope that during the past dozen
years or so I have borne a sufficient part in the struggle for the advancement
of pictorial photography to be safe from any suspicion of now turning my
hand against it. I would merely seek, with all diffidence, to utter a word
of caution, and plead for a little real socialism on the part of our artistic
autocrats, lest modern photography pass from the list of the humanities,
and be marred by a spirit of intolerant esotericism.
I am not, of course, upholding the vulgar print which appeals to an ignorant
and brutish multitude, but it is surely worth considering what that
difference of appeal is, which is made by the works of past great painters
and the productions of those of the very modern school. I know that the
latter please me most with their piquancy, but the great pictures which go
chiefly to furnish our National Galleries are better to live with and will the
more readily teach those who affect no special connoisseurship in art, the
knowledge and appreciation of higher things. It is all very well to lay the
flattering unction to our souls that art is not for the multitude, for yet the
great art of the past is, to a great extent at least, a source of enjoyment

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