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

" in painting, pigments are the great mischief-makers!,, Again: “Yet,
through the accident of favorable lighting, an extraordinary truth may be
brought out in a photograph." As though photographic lighting was always,
and necessarily, accidental and not as deliberately brought about and con-
trolled as the Professor's pigments are selected and mixed! Once more: " By
a combination of mechanical circumstances, over which no man can have
control, a camera may bring out a beautiful and remarkable effect,” etc., etc.
How extremely interesting it is to learn that our cameras work by them-
selves, that our tripods stalk about by their own volition till satisfied, etc., etc.!
If either of our sapient critics really knew (or chose to know) what a
good, sympathetic, learned, well-studied photographic portrait or picture of
a cathedral interior could be, they would know that they are simply judging
an art by its worst record, the base travesties too often produced, barren of
anything beyond untrue mechanicalness. It is well that we in our turn do
not risk our reputations for sweet reasonableness or sanity by judging the
possibilities of painting as an art by even the mediocrities that their own
vaunted Royal Academy yearly hangs up as " works of art,” to the dismay of
even the sensitive artist-photographer! No; we prefer to think of Rembrandt,
of Yelasquez, of Van Dyck, of Van Eyck, of Dürer, of Canaletto, of
Hogarth, of Millais, of Rossetti, of Whistler, of Corot, of Matthew Maris,
and of the host of other names that crowd to one's mind.
If Photography is capable of anything at all, it is just here, in the adequate
rendering of light and shade in all their relative subtleties. The " hopeless
confusion” (if it ever exists) comes from the inexperienced worker, just as
does the “hopeless confusion” of color-contrasts and relations in a bad
painting, or the " hopeless confusion” of false perspective or bad drawing.
And when our draughtsman-critic says it is even so in " the best of photo-
graphs,” what are we to think? Is it merely a bad case of mendacious mis-
statement or a bad case of incompetent observation or mal-observation ?
He means, of course, the best he has seen, and as he has for years had the
London exhibitions before him it is curious to imagine how he can justify
such a statement.
It may possibly be judged as slightly unfair to rake up for cheap and
easy slaughter so stale an article as this of 1897, since which time history-
making in Pictorial Photography has taken such strides, but this same critic
indulges in the same game to this day and the same empty opinions are still
given forth as art-dicta of final importance.
Our critic seems to score a point when he says “it is mechanically im-
possible in the majority of cases for the lens to take in the subject wanted.”
The lens is certainly continually being limited, brought up standing, rendered
useless by a too close proximity of walls which prevent the use of that
point of view which alone will give the desired picture perfectly. But here
again the argument is an empty one, superficial only; for the critic is but
condemning something that does not exist; the helpful critic does not spend
his time or paper in merely saying what Mr. So-and-So has not done other
things he might have done.