Camera Work: A Photographic Quarterly (1904 (Heft 8))

And so it would distinctly appear that it is a fashion which is not a
fashion of the moment, a fashion which has been as highly perfected as that
of the Greeks, or the Italians of the Renaissance, and which is as true to
nature as theirs is, which all artists must hold before them. Have we it?
It need not be Greek, or Renaissance, or Dutch; but it must be something
more invariable than a brown-shadow school, or a violet-shadow school.
I think we have it, not in its perfected state, but in its vigorous youth.
It is photography.
Photography is that permanent fashion which is to replace the Greek.
It is amongst us already and we hardly know its influence. It is molding
our concepts of nature without our being aware. It is slow in asserting
itself, but it can abide its time. It is still in the process of formation, but it
has come to stay.
Unfortunately, there is photography and photography, and its influence
has been as well for evil as for good. It is almost the only science or art in
which the amateur practitioner is better than the professional. Until very
recently the professional has been vilely bad and has dragged in the mud a
science and an art which may be made as beautiful as any other. Grant
the good and the bad photography, you may say, but why does either form
a standard wherein rests the ideal that is to become a fashion influencing our
conception of nature ? Let us analyze the Greek and see what the great
English painter tells his pupils to look for. Truth, above all things, he
says; truth to form and line, truth of proportions. This is exactly what the
better class of photograph gives; truth to line always, and truth to form not
infrequently. Often those photographers who understand their art portray
a nude as well modeled as that of the greatest painters. And it is this truth
laid on the flat, be it a painting or a photograph, fixed and immovable, that
guides us in our judgment of the appearance of nature. Any draughtsman
will tell us how much easier it is to understand and copy from a print than
from life. The very immobility of the print allows us to study it at leisure,
consciously, or perhaps unconsciously, to analyze the proportions, grasp the
structure and feel the modeling. Life, ever moving and restless, eludes,
confuses; and the lay mind, often even the artist, turns to prints, paintings,
and sculpture, and therefrom forms his idea of the appearance of nature. In
the day of Sir Joshua Reynolds, there being no method of scientifically and
surely transcribing nature on the flat, the standards, either of the day or of
the past, were studied in order to learn the truth. Particularly were the
standards of the past preferred because the Greeks were truer to life.
The Discourses further proclaim the Greek as a standard of simplicity
and extol the masterly massing of detail. What does photography say of
simplicity and massing of detail? If we are to believe the results given us
by the average so-much-per-dozen photographer, then indeed nature is vile,
a disjointed mass of obtrusive detail and meaningless retouching of empty
planes. Unfortunately, this class of photograph, obtruding itself on every
avenue, reproduced in every magazine, is better known than the pure photo-
graph, pure in its simplicity and beautifully subordinated detail, pure in its