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

These two specimen beginners honestly believe that they have extracted
from the process all that it can give, and, if they are afflicted with what their
friends call originality, they will later on exaggerate the distinctive racial
peculiarities of their first creations and we shall have a school of figure-studies
with flesh of granite structure and of cotton-wool landscapes with gray paper
shadows.
It must be understood that there is no process under the sun that can
be responsible for a more complete series of abominable, inartistic effects than
gum-bichromate. Between the innocent white paper that emerges from the
developing-tray when exposure has been insufficient and the black and for-
bidding surface of the overexposed sheet, unresponsive to all developing
agents, there are many and many stages of possible artistic deformities—and
few of artistic excellence. The former, like all ill things, force themselves
upon you; the latter, more timid, have to be wooed; and the beginner,
deceived by wrong teaching or absence of teaching, is apt to be satisfied with
the bad. It follows that some sort of definition of the best results must be
found. Though it is a common adage throughout photographic literature
that photography must resemble no other graphic art, I must say that the
best results I have ever seen in gum, in Steichen’s , Puyo’s, Watzek’s, Kühn's,
etc., have always reminded me forcibly of fine engravings, fine etchings, fine
lithographs or fine wash-drawings. The repetition of the adjective is inten-
tional, for, notwithstanding that this fact is never considered in the eternal
comparisons between recognized art-processes and photography, there are
thousands of engravings, etchings, lithographs and wash-drawings that are
quite as bad as any very bad gum-print. Of course, I am referring only to
the beauty of the blacks, the delicacy of the half-tones and the general quality
of the spots of color, aside from subject or composition, for these have noth-
ing to do with what we are writing about. And I must add, also, that by
beautiful blacks I do not mean intensely dark tones, but shadows, whatever
their value, that give the impression of depth and not of a flat surface of
merely black paper.
For the initiated, or perhaps for the insane (this is a question of words),
there is a most exquisite pleasure in the contemplation of fine shades of deep
and translucent black independently of form. I must be a little mad in that
quarter, for a beautiful smudge of Indian ink on white, creamy paper will in-
terest me much more than many an elaborate bromide picture. You will
find on analyzing Japanese works of art in monochrome, such as kakemonos,
that most of the special sensation derived therefrom is due to the beautiful
quality and freshness of the blacks and to the wonderful gradation from pearl-
gray to deep shadow. A Japanese artist lately presented to me an exquisite
decorative study which he painted before my eyes in twelve strokes of the
brush on a large sheet of beautiful paper. It consisted of a bamboo-stem
thrown diagonally across the paper, with a few dagger-like leaves to fill the
proper spaces. The stem was painted with one stroke of the brush and a
few stoppages where the knots of the wood came in, the difference of tone
between the light and dark side of the round stem being obtained by unequal

34