Camera Work: A Photographic Quarterly (1905 (Heft 10))

that he cherishes it in seclusion, and gives out little scraps of it in charity to
the world. This he calls expressing himself; and when the world, full of
large preoccupation and in no need of charity, overlooks his scraps, he gives
it bad names. Really, considering how busy the world is and how brimful it
is of varied interest, it may seem astonishing that it gives so much attention
as it does to a great deal of what passes by the name of art. That it gives
its attention to the wrong thing in art is the opinion of every artist who does
not find a market for his wares. That is natural. When he does, the public
taste is improving.
But this inordinate egoism, this infatuation of the artist to express him-
self, leads to strange results, of which disordered hair, curious, unaccustomed
clothes, and a general appearance of having been sleeping in tree-tops are
but external symptoms. Even more uncanny are the mental symptoms;
the arrogant pretensions on the one hand and the fatal self-dissatisfaction on
the other; I know no graver example of this than the one presented by
photography.
Here was an honorable and, except for the condition to which it is apt
to reduce the finger-nails, as clean a profession as you could desire. Fortune,
in the guise of science, had been more than commonly propitious. Discov-
eries and inventions — for details I refer you to the advertisements in this
magazine—had so eliminated all need of labor and knowledge that every
man, woman, and child, by simply pushing a button or squeezing a rubber
ball could become his or her own “ pictorialist." Where shall you find
another profession so smoothed of obstacles, so inviting to the meanest
capacity ? As a consequence the land was filled with satisfied " pictorialists ”
making countless pictures of each other and this sunny world.
So it was and might have continued to be. But into this smiling para-
dise stalked the shadow of too much ego. It appeared sporadically in several
parts of the country, accumulatively in New York. Men, and women too,
arose and said it is beneath our notice to pictorialize what any one may see.
So they produced effects which nobody had ever seen or ever expected to
behold. The world wondered and asked why should such things be? “We
are expressing ourselves," they said. Then they borrowed heathen gibberish
from the painters and murmured of tones and values, sentiment, and so forth.
And as the bewilderment of the honest folk in the profession grew, they
took a fiendish delight in adding to their mystification. They reveled in
curious subjects, and the most ordinary subjects treated curiously; one real
artist seven times made faces at his camera and entitled the residuum the
“Seven Last Words." But that was in Boston.
The major part of the mischief centered in and adjacent to Fifth Avenue,
New York. Here was a club established for the furtherance of mediocrity;
for the giving of the glad hand to everybody whom everybody could
reasonably consider their inferiors. Nothing need have marred the equable
futility of this institution, but for its harboring a preposterous specimen of
the too much ego. He was of the fighting variety, who delighted to stir up
trouble, and then jump in where the blows were thickest; a practical politician
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