Camera Work: A Photographic Quarterly (1904 (Heft 5))

to place it upon the shoulders of the sympathetic public, who, each to his
own fancy, fills the vacancy which the producer lacked ideas to fill.
¶ To return to the previous train of thought, it should be remembered that
sounds and scents are longer remembered than visible objects. So also it
may be are those indefinable appeals which light, air, and natural beauty
make to the sensitive temperament, and if we are to reproduce an impression
rather than produce a graphic catalogue of physical facts, we must resort to
some other means than mere prosaic representation. What those means
may be each worker must perhaps decide for himself. Meanwhile, the
recognition of such necessity may form the justification of method and
manners which seem strange and unconventional. Personally, I resent
neither etching on the negative, nor penciling, nor other work on the print,
so long as the end is gained; yet should I resort to neither, for let us profess
to scorn ever so the means as being base as compared with the inspired
motive, there is dignity in the mastery of technique, a mastery which slips
further and further from our grasp as we yield to the easier course of
introducing alien means.
¶ Mr. Day may pride himself upon the photographic purity of his results
with neither more nor less artistic justification than has Mr. Eugene for
scratching the film.
¶ It has been urged that to suppress sharp definition is to sacrifice one
of photography’s characteristics which has made it so precious. But
indiscriminately sharp focus is not a necessary attribute of photography,
but an optical curiosity, which the photographer has been deceived into
believing he required by the lens-maker, who equally guilelessly, exerted
himself to achieve. There can be no fixed standard of technical excellence,
but the photographic print is technically good in proportion as the
photographer has, to attain his end, used all those qualities and technicalities
with which a highly perfected process has been splendidly endowed by
unsympathetic but well-meaning people.
A. Horsley Hinton.

O life, how paradoxical!
Of two, each a “ professional,"
The one took her full face
And found a ready sale for it;
The other only took her purse
And had to go to jail for it.
Dallett Fuguet.

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