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

ordinary body of photographers, because, on the average, the painter has spent
far more time and had far more experience with art than has the photog-
rapher. Many of the best camera-workers, as we all know, only practice
their art as a side-issue. However, I think it would be the greatest mistake
to hand over the judgings of the prints entered for exhibitions to a body com-
posed exclusively of painters for the following all-important reason: the
painters might select those prints which displayed the greatest knowledge of
art, but the very ones which showed some great photographic advance, which
solved some much-vexed optical or chemical problem, would frequently be
the ones turned down; and as at the present moment it is far more important
that photography should advance photographically rather than paintorially,
so is it also more important that all possible encouragement should be given
to purely photographic qualities of expression. Now, I say, that at present
the purely photographic qualities are the ones to be encouraged, for the
simple reason that until they have been developed to the full, or at least far
more than they are at present, it will be impossible even to divine the direc-
tion that photography will eventually take ; but if the judgment of what is
what is exclusively left to the painters, it is not at all impossible to conceive
that they might throw photography off its natural and most profitable track,
thus precluding, or at least retarding, the discovery of new fields of art. A
painter once remarked to me that a pictorial photographer was like a man
who, when he wanted to throw a stone, stood on his left ear instead of his
legs, and that he should be stopped doing this nonsense. Nor would my
friend admit that even if standing on the left ear while throwing a stone
should, if long enough persisted in, produce an entirely new and interesting
result that the act was in any sense defensible.
But there is another side to the question which was pointed out to me
by Alfred Stieglitz. Photographers frequently do not understand painters ;
I do not mean their work, that is not really necessary, but their way of
expressing themselves about art, and particularly about photographs.
When a photograph is shown to a painter he will be affected, and think and
reason in the manner we have already seen; but under all this runs another
current of thought, or, rather, there runs a current of translation. As fast as
his mind grasps any photographic beauty, just so fast does it translate it into
painter-images (that is, if the photograph appeals); and further: in those
passages where the photograph is only partially successful, the painter may
see infinite possibilities; and it is of these images and possibilities that he
speaks, and not of what he is really looking at. Why this is so is not diffi-
cult to explain. All artists are in the habit of making sketches, sometimes
nothing more than mere daubs, and into these, to other people meaningless
blotches, they will stare to discover the possibilities of their projected picture.
In this way their imagination becomes cultivated to a high degree, and a
black-and-white scrawl is often all that is needed to conjure up a picture
replete with color. In addition to this, their preconceived idea that pho-
tography is but the handmaiden to art, is so strong that it never occurs to
them to look at a photograph as the thing itself; it is regarded as something
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