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

sure that you do not become confused between inherited race associations
and personal likings which have been formed during your lifetime, for
charming as these latter may be to you, they are not general, and therefore,
although not necessarily inartistic, are unartistic. But if you are a true
artist and thoroughly arrived, why, then you can disobey all the voices of
nature—you may even succeed in the almost impossible feat of combining
your thoughts with railroad-yards, locomotives, and skyscrapers.
Roland Rood.

ON ART AND ORIGINALITY AGAIN.
EVERY NOW and then there is a recrudescence of those views based on
the popular obsession that mere optical and chemical excellencies and
mathematical accuracies make for art in photography, while, as a matter of
fact, they are especially misleading to their undiscriminating admirers. Though
oft confuted—as much as such persons can be said to be confuted—the
exponents of such ideas still urge accuracy and “truth to nature”—by which
they mean only apparent truth to the facts, accidentals and all, in their line of
vision. They argue that " delicate rendition of planes,” " apparent depth,”
and so on, are reasons for a peculiar claim to artistic value for the products of
pure photography when tastefully done. This at best is bald naturalism,
but at its usual worst it is as bad as claiming that " all hand-painted” work is
art. If the most elementary laws of esthetics be considered with an open
mind, any fair student must see that in no form are renderings or repre-
sentations of natural facts truly art merely because they are good reports, no
matter how accurately, how daintily or how deceptively they may be done.
But there seems great need for a continual protest against views so mistaken,
especially when in any way put forth by advocates of pictorialism, who thus
hinder the cause they try to advance—yes, need to save photography from its
many ununderstanding friends, above all others. Almost every one means to
love beauty and tries to appreciate it—just as they intend to do right—but
often their conceptions of beauty, as sometimes of right, are rudimentary, or
twisted, or ill-proportioned. The cure for this ill, and the need for all, is
ever for greater culture, to broaden the understanding of life and of art. If
people will only try to look at art with vision undistorted by primitive
prejudices and childish ideas concerning natural phenomena, they will see
that artifice is not art, and they will find themselves greatly rewarded and
spiritually enriched.
Briefly: graphic art is a means to tell us something by symbolizing, on
a flat surface, any of the objects seen by us in space. It is employed to
give us some idea that was in the mind of the artist, to communicate the
sentiment he had about this thing, or collocation of space-objects. He
assembles certain things in his picture because he considers them essential to
his idea, selecting them thus to make an esthetic unity. If it helps his
purpose to have many gradations and many focal planes or abundant detail,

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