Camera Work: A Photographic Quarterly (1905 (Heft 9))

acceptance as final of any human verdict upon the superiority of the work of
one person or school. Upon the perfection of technical handling alone can
final decision be rendered. To undertake to maintain this indisputably the
greatest work of art, that person, the master, were insufferable arrogance.
To fail to point out what seems greatest, the most masterful, and the
why would be inexcusable in, and an intolerable violation of the chief duty
of, a critic and reviewer.
Sometimes vanity leads the critic into the assumption of arrogant in-
fallibility. More often wounded vanity heats the critics into charging him
with unfairness and arrogance. Art standards are relative. What was
exceptional to-day may be all but mediocre to-morrow. He whose calling
and opportunities keep him in touch with the most advanced work, all things
being equal, is most apt to be right in his judgment. Also, he is apt to be
most conservative, would he not make himself and his calling ridiculous.
By those not similarly circumstanced, his conservatism is apt to be mistaken
for narrowness or partisanship. But already Dr. Schütze’s lines have carried
me far from my subject—for which he must be my apologist.
Mrs. Eva Watson-Schütze, in the photographic world, has played an
active and varying part, varying not in its consistency, but its fields of
activity. She first adopted photography as her medium of expression but
comparatively a few years ago. For six years she had been a student in the
Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, intending to become a painter. Then,
for another seven, she worked at a photo-copper reproduction process.
Then, with her friend, Miss Van Buren, of Detroit, breaking the chains of
this bondage, she determined to turn her art-training to account in the pro-
duction, professionally, of photographs. Mrs. Schütze exhibited some of
her work at the Philadelphia Salon of 1898, where I first saw it. She was
then almost unknown in the photographic circles in Philadelphia. To
Edmund Stirling, who, through the first Philadelphia Salon, had become a
staunch adherent of the pictorial movement, I later wrote for information for
" Camera Notes” concerning this new worker whose prints showed marked
merit. I was then on the staff of " Camera Notes,” and it was the policy of
that quarterly, as it is of Camera Work, to bring before the photographic
world all work of distinct merit. It was Edmund Stirling, ever alert to the
interests of photography, and the photographic society of which he was then
secretary, who brought about the introduction of Mrs. Schütze, then Miss
Watson, into photographic circles in Philadelphia. From the very beginning
of her photographic career, before she ever knew anything of the existing
pictorial movement, she was in sympathy with all that it stood for. Writing,
in the spring of 1900, she says: " It seems curious to have lived in the
midst of this ' spirit ’; to have been in absolute sympathy with it, and to have
been entirely unconscious of what was going on in the photographic world.”
Elected to the Photographic Society of Philadelphia in November,
1899, she soon became one of the most advanced and uncompromising
members of the pictorial wing of that organization. During the bitter
debates that followed, when the factions of the society joined issue in that

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