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

ferry-boat, street-car, elevated train are packed to suffocation with a swaying,
struggling mass of refined and vulgar, the cleanly and the unwashed, all
wildly hastening, seemingly, in the same direction. In the street, at places
of amusement, in temples of worship, it is ever the same; always the crowd,
nervous, jostling, ever in a hurry. It is striving and straining and rush,
whether it be man or beast, ambulance or hearse. Time for reflection there
is none—it is always hurry, hurry, hurry, unrest, unrest, unrest. We
hear but the roar and rattle of the city whose din is never still. We breathe
air heavy with overuse, surcharged with noxious gases from sewers, eating-
houses,from factories, alive with deadly germs from secret disease and veiled
decay. It is not hard to imagine how great at times is the desire to get away
from all this into the pure-aired open country. And when that is impossible,
fancy what a boon is the feelingly executed little landscape to those cooped up
in the stuffy confines of the grimy city in office, shops, factory, or counting-
house. Landscape! How the word and its associations take one out of
oneself into a delicious world of sylvan dreams of trees, of trickling, gurgling
streams, of odorous flowers of many forms and wondrous colors, of sunlit
lawns and leaf-shaded bowers, of distant hills, of purple-hued mountains
against sunset skies, of night creeping down beautiful, silent valleys flooded
with moon-silvered mist. Even tired nature revives under the spell of a
mere dream of landscape, imagination awakens, satyrs and elfin peoples and
the wood-gods of old come forth from hiding and disport themselves, playing
upon their pipes, singing mystic rural songs. The symbolism of all these
old-time myths and their deeper meaning is made clear to us through our
imprisonment and takes on a new and more human significance. Birds
warble, bright-colored insects dart about flashing the sunlight from their
sparkling iridescent wings, cattle drowse in the shade, and all the world seems
young and fresh with the odors of flowers, of sweet grass, of new-mown hay.
Life seems again worth living.
Already the cobwebs are brushed aside from the brain that has been warped
and distorted through lack of proper horizon, through having to come
into daily contact with extreme conditions till they seem the rule rather than
the exception, through having to view things in such close proximity as to
get an altogether exaggerated idea of their relative proportions, the perspective
of life begins to adjust itself to what is broad and healthful and true.
And we long with a vast longing to get out into the open to feast our eyes and
our souls upon the meadows or the forests, the rolling prairies or the wooded
mountains. If the mere thought of all this can so work upon the fancy, how
much more must the properly pictured landscape excite ? What a rich field
for the happy philanthropist who by aid of his pictorial magic can, with a
harmonious disposition of lights and shades, bring before the eyes and soul
of the poor galley-slave of modern life such pure joy and envied hope ! How
few, how very few understand! Think, realize what vast possibilities be
within reach ! Dream a bit, if you possess the gift of dreaming, and go and
try and interpret nature pictorially,in a way that will make others less fortunate
feel the thrill of some beautiful nature-dream. Joseph T. Keiley.

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