Camera Work: A Photographic Quarterly (1905 (Heft 12))

THE EVOLUTION OF ART FROM
WRITING TO PHOTOGRAPHY.

WHEN MAN first came on earth we know not; and whether he was the
offspring of the monkey, or the monkey of him, we are equally ignorant —
even that he didn't originate in the Garden of Eden, we are unable to say
— but in one thing all accounts agree, and that is that he had a pretty hard
time of it in those early days. Keeping himself and his family alive, and
warding off the attacks of wild animals and human enemies, were about as
much as he could attend to ; so when ethnologists tell us that the first
drawing and painting our prehistoric ancestors indulged in was not for
decorative purposes, not to amuse themselves and each other, but always
with a utilitarian object in view, we can not be surprised. Ethnologists
further inform us that these utilitarian objects were manifold: that certain
colors had certain significances, and painting the body was (in the earlier
stages of savage life) with the idea of propitiating the gods, or to induce
magical results, and so forth. But the most important use painting and
drawing were put to was picture-writing: it was through the means of
drawings and pictures that messages were transmitted to a distance, and also
that events and laws were recorded.
Extensive scientific research shows that making pictures has been the
writing and literature of savages in all times, and is still so of existing
savages—unless indeed they have been taught otherwise. The instinct to
draw seems ever to have existed, the earliest of all known human inhabitants
on the globe, the cave-dwellers, drew; there are found to-day in their caves
fragments of sketches carved into the ivory of the mammoth. Figure I is
such a sketch, and through all the wear of ages the outlines of the hairy
mammoth are still to be distinguished — or are there not two, one behind
the other? Figure II is another fragment on which can be clearly seen the
heads of two horses, the nude figure of a man carrying something on a stick
over his shoulder, an eel or snake, and some systematic markings of some
kind. This latter drawing appears to me to be part of an account of some
event. Now these two pictures or narratives were made during the period
of the flood (there really appears to have been a flood, or rather a series),
and when we consider that they are the work of savages we can not but admire
the free and virile use of the line. Of a much later date is Figure III, and
more puerile in its execution, but a good example of North American
Indian picture-writing. It is the record of how a chief (man on horseback
with magical drumstick) led an expedition of fifty-one men in five canoes
across Lake Superior. The first canoe was commanded by his ally, Kish-
kemunazee, Kingfisher in English (drawing of that bird), and the whole party
reached land (the land-tortoise) after three days (three suns under the sky).
For how long our ancestors (European and Asiatic) practiced picture-
writing it is impossible to say, but countless ages must have passed before
they arrived at the transition period that we find in the Egyptian hiero-
glyphics of about 3,000 B.C. This transition was from picture-writing to