Camera Work: A Photographic Quarterly (1904 (Heft 6))

SOME THOUGHTS ON A WOOD.
“ One impulse from a vernal wood
May teach you more of man,
Of moral, evil, and of good,
Than all the sages can.”
THE BEAUTIFUL reproduction of Alvin Coburn's “Winter
Shadows” in the third number of Camera Work started me thinking
how very few photographers go to the woods for their inspirations.
Sky, sea, mountain, and plain have all been pressed into the service over
and over again. Of course, incidentally trees play a more or less important
part in all these compositions. But they play the part of trees only, trees
that help to make the landscape-picture, and we are all conscious of the
heavy debt we owe them in this direction. How useful they are as masses
of shadow, and what decorative lines and graceful forms they often make;
and, indeed, in many other ways greatly help us to suggest a feeling or a
sentiment in a landscape that would otherwise have been difficult or
perhaps impossible to express by photography !
But in a wood, where there is “ a brotherhood of venerable trees,” they
take on themselves quite a different character, and seem in their collective
state to produce an atmosphere that one is conscious of in no other
surroundings, except, perhaps, in some great church. Indeed, the strong
affinity of the sensations experienced by many in a wood and in the empty
nave of a cathedral has often been noticed, and there is very much more than
a chance likeness in these feelings. A pleasurable solemnity (if I may use
such a term) is common to both, and “the peace, deep joy, and satisfaction,
the sense of withdrawal, apartness from the rush of life,” that Mr. Frederick
Evans describes as the results of repeated visits to a cathedral, are also
experienced by the devotee of the woods.
The varying effects of forests on different temperaments are very
marked. Personally, I have known individuals who will quickly become
depressed by a short walk in a noiseless wood; and others on whom these
surroundings seem to act as balm; and again others who have “a kinship
with the trees” which to them impart inspiration, developing all their latent
sentiment. To the last named, it often seems as if
“ Dim voices whisper half-remembered things,
And know a world of mystery is near.”
It is at least remarkable that more individuals with this temperament
have not devoted their abilities to giving us photographically their own
interpretation of the spirit of the woods.
Of course we all know how unpaintable a wood is, generally speaking;
and can it be that camera-men have taken the hint from their brothers of
the brush in studiously avoiding the subject? But it seems as if the
objections that pertain to painting do not apply to photography, for,
colors that might not be satisfactory on a canvas are by the camera reduced
to so many gradations of tone ; consequently, what might be crude if suggested
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