Camera Work: A Photographic Quarterly (1905 (Heft 11))

as possible, plays upon a chord within us that reverberates back to the
remotest times. And in the same manner the moonlight and the night, the
dawn and the evening, the storm and the wind all carry us away to the day
when we first came on earth, to the land of dreams.
But there are certain people known to the artist as Philistines who have
either in the progress of civilization lost, or dropped, those primitive parts of
their brain, or in whom, for some reason, these parts seem to be sluggish, and
they never see or feel anything except the surface of nature, and as a rule do
not care for the country for its own sake. We of the more highly developed
brain, or, let us say, we who have retained and not lost any part, are apt to
speak of them as savages; but in truth it is we artists and poets who are
much nearer the savages; we connect much more closely with the Indians,
the mound-builders, and the cannibals. Philistines are a product of
civilization. Let us hope that civilization will not become too general.
However, as the process of brain-growth is continual we may all eventually
lose our link with the remote past, and in the distant future come to look
upon buildings in the shape of banks or stock-exchanges or bar-rooms, as
being poetical, and even skyscrapers may be the ideal architecture.
In putting forth the claim that personal feeling in landscape has its
origin in our savage life, I do not mean to say that all that we feel to be
personal is of this order; much can be traced to later periods, even connecting
with the very present, such as shapes like church-spires, and even half-
remembered attachments of our childhood will act in the same way, but the
further back the root is the stronger will be the sentiment induced.
As a matter of interest, although it has nothing to do with landscape, I
will here point out that the feeling of awe which a portrait or figure lit in a
Rembrandtesque manner inspires in us is unquestionably due to an inherited
memory of the past, a memory of the same order I have been speaking of,
an instinctive remembrance of those religious war-dances when we contorted
ourselves madly under the flaring torchlight.
Quite different from the above exists another order of attribution of
personality to landscape. We are very apt to feel that there is something
human in nature when its forms or motions to any extent imitate those of
either men or animals. The waving arms of the windmill act as if they lived,
often clouds and trees look like grotesque monsters, and outlines of hills and
mountains frequently copy the nude.
Now, let us see how you as a pictorial photographer can apply these
psychological laws to the direct end of producing pictures. We all know
that a picture is the combination of nature with the artist’s personality, but as
in photography this combination is intensely difficult to effect, unless indeed
you are one of the princes of art, there are left two courses to you: either to
introduce the human element through local manipulation, by the glycerine
and gum process, etc., or to select some such motive as by the very nature and
composition of its material produces in you all those reflex thoughts we have
been speaking of, and revives a broken chain of memories. If you select
the second method, namely what is usually termed straight photography, be

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