Camera Work: A Photographic Quarterly (1904 (Heft 7))

artist, the best reply is that the latter should include the former. One may
almost wholly agree with Lessing—“ Every artist is a born critic, but every
critic is not a born artist.” Only this is using the term artist to mean pro-
ducer, and many capable producing artists make very deficient critics because
too immersed in their special field of work to be catholic enough for really
good criticism.
To do all this seriously is to be all of an artist, except for the actual
producing power, and, if the camera and lens as tools are to be excluded, this
deficiency is surely due only to lack of the necessary physical equipment, the
natural start in physical gift of expression which is given to man unsought
and which it is the artist’s mission to train and develop. Man has no power
over this natural equipment nor over his environment; all he is called on to
do is to till his little plot of ground to the utmost degree of productiveness;
and his success in this, whether in the direction of making or of appreciating,
makes him an artist indeed, or a mere sham or a negligible quantity.
The artist is he who either does or feels truly and deeply, not merely he
who happens to be gifted by nature’seccentricity with a facility with brush
or pencil and who perhaps uses neither to any real advantage or successful
achievement.
Take the art of singing for an analogous example; how very often we
find Dame Nature in her stupidity giving a superb larynx to the man with
no soul, while to the man who is all soul, pulsating with music and the
desire to express it vocally, she denies the necessary gift of this said superb
larynx and dowers him only with the capacity of suffering from the other
man’s misdoings !
In painting, take Millais, who was a prodigy almost from infancy; if
he had happened to have lost both his hands in childhood he would still
have been Millais, the artist, all his life, though his only proof to the world
would then have been his searching, instant and instinctive appreciation and
knowledge of true art-work.
Of course, our opponent’s text means that a photographer, qua photog-
rapher, can never be an artist, and all such talk as I have here indulged in is,
at best, smilingly condoned as merely a pathetic sort of plea for recognition
as a " real artist.” But we, in our turn, can afford to smile when the painter-
critic tells us we are not and never can be “artists” in our chosen medium
of expression, if we produce something which is not merely “nearly as good”
as the painter could have done in his own way, but something which is inde-
pendently as good, as valuable, as true, as personal, and which, at the same
time, is as manifestly a photograph—something produced by camera and
lens—as a painting is a thing produced by pigments and brushes.
But it must be remembered that it is only those who study art-worksas
seriously as a would-be painter does who can hope to achieve real success
and advance this independent value in and recognition of camera-work.
We must not allow ourselves to make crude mistakes in subject or
treatment, for if we do it inevitably happens that it is not the worker who
gets blamed, but photography, a very different thing. Therein can be found