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

truth to nature. It is this same kind of photograph that has worked evil
for the true photographer as well as for the painter. It is these libels on
nature that have caused the public to cry out that photography is a science
and not an art—exactly why a science is difficult to understand, because
science is truthful. It is these same licked facsimiles of characterless and
unimportant details with which we are daily surrounded in our home, and
which mamma and papa have come to believe are beautiful, that are held up
to the painter as a guide in his portrait of their daughters. Until the shops,
parading their rows of waxen beauties, are relegated to the side streets, the
true fashion can not prevail.
The Greeks also left us a philosophy of the action of men and animals,
which was accepted without thought until the instantaneous photograph told
us otherwise. We all remember with what amusement we first regarded the
photograph of horses and dogs in the act of running and leaping, their legs
curled under them in the manner of the legs of a dead spider; how they
appeared to stand still and never moved over that bar. Do we feel this
to-day? Do not the horses move and leap in spite of their legs? And why ?
Is it not because we have in a measure forgotten the Greek fashion and
accepted the new ? Has not the Greek fashion become a little wooden ?
In the Greek ideals was also included an abstract conception of pro-
portions. Photography can give only the truth, but in giving the truth it
has given much that is beautiful and new. Are there not other proportions
of the human figure beside those of the Greeks that are harmonious ?
Certainly, if the mission of art is to point out the beauties of nature and
make us love and understand these same beauties, then the photograph has
much to say; for, sublime as the Greek proportions are, do we often see
them in actual life ?
In the matter of composition photography has no end to tell us; much
more than the Greek. Such Greek composition as has come down to us is
stereotyped in the extreme and has lost its hold on almost all healthy art.
The conceptions of landscape composition, which swayed the minds of
English painters until very recently, can not be better illustrated than by
quoting two of the questions in an examination paper, which came under my
notice not long ago, intended for the students of the Royal Academy. They
were: “What size and of what proportions should a landscape be?” and
"Where should the little brown tree be placed?”
The rapidity and ease with which experiments in composition can be
tried with the camera has given to the painter a means to enlarge his con-
ception of composition of which he has availed himself more generally than
the public think. The disrepute brought upon photography by that horde
who practice it for the dollars in it has made painters a little afraid of the
censure they might incur from association with such a mode of procedure,
and they deny it. Yet many of the modern compositions, full of sudden
surprises, are taken directly from the negative.
Lastly, what do the Greek ideals say of values—that is, of the translation
of color-values into black and white ? The Greek says nothing, and the