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

lack of logic he will find much fault with the “nakedness” of the result, not
realizing that in photography, where the power of selective combination is
eliminated, the problem of producing the nude must be almost impossible.
Again, take a purely mechanical question — that of the printing-paper —
show a worker in oils a print on one of the P.O.P. papers and he may find
it a little hard; " A photograph, of course,” he will say. But, let him see
another print in gum (straight), not letting him know that the paper is dif-
ferent, and he will usually conclude that the man who made the negative had
a finer sense of art than most of the photographers he knows; that he must
have taken his photograph on one of those “softly luminous days.” In
other words, the artist will often mistake a purely mechanical matter for an
esthetic one. And when we come to the varying scales of gradation, from
light to dark, that the photographer can produce by merely altering his
printing-paper, or, in other cases, the sensitizing-bath, the artist never under-
stands at all. It remains incomprehensible how a mechanical “trick” should
produce a technical and even psychological change. How the same negative
should, through the alteration of mathematical and chemical conditions, pro-
duce at one moment a light, soft, dreamy, gray day, and the next a hard,
dark, cheerless day, is most mysterious to him; and equally so is the fact
that under one chemical and physical condition a negative will give all its
detail to the sensitized paper, and under another will hold it back, for he
has always been taught to believe that the subordination and expression
and general handling of detail belong exclusively to the esthetic depart-
ment of art.
Examples of misconception of the esthetic anatomy of photographs on
the part of the painters can be found in abundance, but various as these
examples may be in their form, they all teach one lesson, namely: that our
philosophy of art is possibly not resting on as solid reasoning as thinkers
have generally supposed; that “there are more things under the heavens
than Plato dreamed of in his philosophy” ; and that some of our systems of
esthetic thought may require revising. Nor am I exaggerating, for when we
find an art in which the mechanics produce upon our artistic sensibilities the
same effect as the psychological qualities do in another, and vice-versa, we
feel much as must have certain mathematicians when they discovered an
algebra in which a multiplied by b did not equal b multiplied by a. The posi-
tion of pictorial photography from the philosophical standpoint is intensely
interesting; one might say that it has entered the art-world as has radium the
physical world; there is something decidedly uncanny about it, and we really
don’tknow where we stand.
So, after all, the ignorance of the painter is not gross; it is quite
excusable; only until he learns more of this photo-pictorial factor so newly
arrived in the art-world, his judgment regarding the intentions, efforts, and
means (mind you, I do not say results) of the photographers is utterly
valueless. But, and it is a big but, I maintain that when it comes to judging
photographs as works of art, as results utterly independent of how they have
been produced, then any ordinary body of painters will judge better than any

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