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

¶ “ But," I said, " I thought you once wrote of a method of your own.”
¶ " So I did,” he replied; " but after that was published I tried it one day
and it would not work, and I have never yet in allmy experience succeeded
in getting gum coated so I could even get an image.”
¶ Now what do you think of that? Does not your sympathy go out to
the deluded amateur who pored over paper, and gum, and pigment, into
which he had already poured his hard cash, in vain efforts to get results
from that process ?
¶ Then there was a fellow who wrote about lantern-slides. Let me see;
who was that? " Somebody on Lantern-slides.” Well, anyhow, there is a
friend of mine who one day got a letter from this fellow, in which he
admitted that his first lantern-slide was made about thirty days before the
treatise was published and that most of it was “culled” from other works.
Can any of you now understand why those last lantern-slides you made did
not come out just as you thought they should ?
¶ But that is not the worst of it. These same fellows start in to write
about artistic photography. And when they start to delve into the mysteries
of foregrounds, and side-lines, and massing, and composition, they certainly
do flounder around at a great rate. They always remind me of a story my
father was fond of telling. An old darky parson was requested by his
congregation to preach on the " ecclesiastical laws,” and urged to a point of
necessity. So one Sunday he arose in the pulpit and said: " Bredren an’
sistahs! Ah will now deliber a disco’se on th’ fundumental principles ob
ecclesiastical laws. If you all knows what dat is you know mo’ dan ah do,
but ah'll stick es close to de subjick es possible.”
¶ How is photography, artistic or otherwise, to advance steadily with such
impediments as these fellows who are always seeing things and dreaming
dreams—regular spectres and nightmares of misinformation? What wonder
a man becomes disgusted with photography when half the problems
propounded by alleged " authorities ” will not work out!
¶ Now, I propose that we band ourselves together in a secret, blood-tied
organization that will make the Philistine's idea of the Photo-Secession
seem like the openness of a Methodist camp-meeting, when it comes to a
comparison of exclusiveness, and let us call it the " Society for the Suppres-
sion of Misdirected Energy on the Part of Misinformed Photographers
Who are Seized with a Mania to Write Instructions (Inc.).”
¶ Then, when some fellow comes along and tells the amateur never to use
more than four ounces of devoloper for an 8 x 10 plate because more (say
4½ or 5 ounces) will invariably fog the plate, or " instructs” the amateur
in art by saying, " Is that artistic photography? Call that artistic
photography? Well, if THAT is artistic photography! ― ― ― X
open his skull and " inspissate ” his gray matter sufficiently to make him
Harry C. Rubincam.
realize the advisability of seizing his last opportunity to desist and live.

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