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

mind through suggestive, ever-fluctuating, infinitely gradated, transparent,
vapory tones.
Yes, it is American photography that is progressing in the direction
consistent with the natural unfolding and progress of art. The English
camera-worker is very skilful in local manipulation of all kinds and succeeds
beautifully in introducing the literary feeling; and the Viennese has inge-
niously made the camera move its results in a minus direction several hundred
years—and I admit that these results are marvelous, but they are retrograde,
and not forward. Therefore I feel that the frontier photographic work is
to-day being done in America, and that this advance movement of art on the
part of the Americans is the natural outcome of their temperament, as a
little analysis will show. We Americans are, as a people, the best news-
paper readers in the world, but it takes little acquaintance with Europeans
to realize that our upper classes are, from the European stand, illiterate. We
are intellectually lazy; we hate to think ; we dislike reading anything that it
requires deep thought to follow; we prefer a receipt to a philosophy, and
action to speculation ; we cultivate our subconscious brain-centers so that
they may in a lightning fashion do our thinking for us without our being
bored by watching or feeling the operation ; we love sensations if we can
enjoy them without intellectual effort;—and in the same way art gratifies us.
In the face of all this, could our art be otherwise than non-literary (photo-
graphic), both painting and photography ?
Now, in following this evolution of art from writing to photography,
has it not struck you that what I have endeavored to show to be a literary
element is the same which many photographers refer to as the personal
touch ? That the whole question of “ local manipulation," “straight” and
“crooked” photography is merely one of the literary element? It appears
so to me. There are, as we know, two distinct ways of manipulating a
negative or print: the first being to alter the drawing, values, etc., in such a
manner as to preserve all the light-drawn qualities, namely the photographic;
the second, to introduce the " human element.” The first way is unques-
tionably photography, but the second is very doubtful, for this " human,
personal element ” is more than apt to be the literary element, and when so
its presence is of necessity unphotographic and retrograde. It goes without
saying that etching in photography is savage in the extreme; it is the
Buckeye of photography.
In conclusion it may not be amiss to point out that the reason of the
general non-appreciation of pictorial photography is not what in any sense
ought to be termed ignorance; as we have seen, it is not natural for us
human beings to look upon nature as she is; on the contrary, it is natural to
look upon nature as she distinctly is not. It is, however, gross ignorance
for us to fail to understand a Rembrandt, a Botticelli, a Giotto, or Egyptian
art, for if our brain is rightly constructed and has retained the lesson each
age has impressed upon it, then will the chain of appreciation to the remotest
past be complete; then will we be able to feel all that has been felt from the
dawn of reason up to the present moment — but not necessarily a step beyond
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