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

HAS THE PAINTERS’JUDGMENT
OF PHOTOGRAPHS ANY VALUE?

THE QUESTION as to whether the painters', opinion of pictorial
photography has any value is becoming of increasing interest, and this,
owing to the fact that each year as photography is more and more receiving
its due recognition as one of the fine arts, so each year the painters are
more and more assuming the authority of their seniority. Possibly, therefore,
it may be profitable to analyze the painters' attitude toward photography
to determine if it is the right one, and, if not, to devise some method for
putting them right. It is even not inconceivable that the photo-pictorialists
themselves may be a little in the wrong and need instructing! Let us inquire.
In photography, as in all the graphic arts, there are three considerations :
the mechanical, the technical, and the psychological, the latter being familiarly
known as the esthetic qualities. The correctness of this classification will
undoubtedly be conceded by both painters and photographers. Beyond this,
however, I believe they will admit and understand little in common. Let
us experiment.
Show any painter a photographic print of a landscape with a superbly
gradated sky. To produce such a sky in painting is a difficult, technical
problem, mechanics entering but slightly; whereas, in photography, it is almost
entirely a matter of mechanics (chemical matters naturally being included with
mechanics), and every snap-shotter frequently, and without even intention,
obtains exquisite gradation. The painter, however, remembering his own
struggles, will unconsciously give far more credit to a good mechanical per-
formance of this kind than it deserves. Also, as almost all the drawing that
the photographer does is really the work of the camera, and consequently
mechanical, it deserves far less praise than the plyer of the brush usually
bestows upon it. On the other hand, the little drawing that the photographer
can do, such as the elimination of exaggerated effects of geometrical (mon-
ocular) perspective, which drawing (I am speaking of straight photography
now) the photographer accomplishes through proper selection of point of
view, lens, etc., but which he accomplishes only by exercising unusual knowl-
edge and expending much thought, is entirely ignored by the painter, although
it is sometimes so essential to the making of the picture. The painter gives
it no praise, for the simple reason that he himself has only a most limited
understanding of what geometric perspective is, for from the very beginning
of his career he has either been taught to draw, or has instinctively drawn,
binocularly. He vaguely believes that " the camera gives wrong perspec-
tive,” and when he sees a photograph in which this fault has, with infinite
pains, been eliminated, he thinks “it just happens to be right.”
When we come to photography of the nude, the artist will almost
invariably praise where there should be no praise, and freely censure what
should be censured with caution; namely, the artist can not help but admire
the marvelous precision with which the lens has delineated that which his
brush, with toil and sorrow, has so often failed to express; and with equal