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

his work as here shown is a fine, solid achievement such as the most ad-
vanced might be proud to father. The prints shown at the Salon and those
I have seen in his portfolio interest me most by reason of their very evident
origin being that of careful forethought, painstaking study, deliberate results
systematically and yet inspiredly sought after. Just the qualities, indeed, that
I have found lacking in much of the other American work. Mr. Coburn
has none of that cheeky indifference to the taking of pains, to mastery of
technique, to hard work, to the real study of the best conditions in and for
what he proposes to record, to a definitely aimed-at and achieved impression.
I think his prints often suffer from a lack of light, are printed in too dark a
key, and therefore tend, though they never fully reach it, toward being ob-
scure, and I hope this capable artist will aim in his future out-door work to
render as much truth in the planes of light in Nature as he does in the
modeling of his quite superb portraits. Nature is infinitely more various
in subtleties of light than his photography has yet exhibited, and I look to
see as great a mastery of this side as he has of the nearly as difficult side of
composition, arrangement, choice of subject.
Gertrude Käsebier’swork does not impress me this year with the old
sense of vigor, personality, alertness; many things there are that I can not
understand at all. No. 33, The Road to Rome, for instance, is a sheer
enigma to me. I like it much as a piece of rich black-and-white, but what
it is all about, or what is its relation to the very definite title given, is too
much for me to grapple with. This question of incongruous, or indefinite,
or non-informative titles is a queer one, and oh, how often does it not make
one sigh and say with good old Cap’nCuttle, " What’shis name ? His
name’s Bunsby; but, Lord, it might be anything for the matter of that! ”
Käsebier’s Portrait of Miss Sears, No. 34, a little lady nursing a black doll-
no, it is not a black doll I see, but a black-and-white spaniel — is wholly
delightful and in her best vein, but the landscape, No. 153, is inexplicable
as coming from so clever and learned a worker. It looks, if I may dare to
say so, like an inferior print, as though there were a very great deal more to
be made out of the figures and their placing; the sky and the wind-blown
tree are good, but the undigested foreground only worries and disappoints.
No. 162, a figure of a girl sketching out-of-doors is nearly faultless, except
that it is unduly dark, seeing how brilliant the light must have been from
the beautiful sunlight across her dress; but the design is so fine and the
general tone so rich as to make it, anyhow, a most acceptable picture. I was
much disappointed in not having any of Mrs. Käsebier’sportraits to hang
this year; this side of her genius is always such a lesson in sterling, sound,
cultivated, finely artistic studio-work, and we need such object-lessons so
keenly that to only get a few clever exercises in landscape-work was to me
a matter of real regret, especially as not one of these landscape-studies gives
me that sense of the inevitable that her best studio-work always does. I
could indeed wish that this real and strong artist would try for as close a
realization of the modeling and variety in planes in her Nature-studies as
she does so uniformly in her portraits. The out-of-door things seem to me

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