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

to sin, and that not mildly, against the beauty and subtlety of Nature’s light;
the key is so persistently dark, regardless of the hour and the altitude of the
sun, and it would be such a gain to pictorial photography if a really clever
artist of Mrs. Käsebier’s rank would set herself to conquer out-of-door
problems, give us on paper a real suggestion, realization of light and of
sunshine.
Mr. Yarnall Abbott’swork does not please me at all this year. It
lacks distinction, freshness, and insight; it arouses the reflection that it
would be so much better to work all through the year for one thoughtful
success than to be content with a number of merely interesting, tentative, and
quite undistinctive things. I am sure Mr. Abbott is easily capable of better
ideas, better technique, less eccentric treatment in subject or title. His
No. 199 is called The Cocktail, but I have always coupled cocktail-drinking
with the “man about town.” Is it a New York habit for ladies in afternoon
visiting-costume to be addicted to them ?
Mr. Clarence White is another fine worker who disappoints me this
year; the general level is distinctly low for one of his assured rank, and in
no one particular picture does he fulfil my expectations or show his old
mastery in subject or intention or treatment. No. 107, The Cave, is to
represent, I suppose, one of our foremothers, but she is verily of a whiteness
of skin strangely impossible for one who had to skin up trees to escape her
animal enemies, and equally impossible for one whose full dress was almost,
I suppose, but a deeper than ordinary fringe of fig-leaves, though Mr. White
does not hint that she owned even that, as he gives her as being content with
Lady Godiva’sriding-costume, clad, as Tennyson has it, " in rippled ringlets
to the knee.” It is evident that Mr. White has felt the error of this undue
whiteness, for a close inspection reveals he has penciled over all the limbs as
an attempt at weathering them, suggesting a primeval out-of-door appearance.
Such an obvious escaping from a photographic difficulty has, of course, no
possible justification; if hand-work is necessary in a print — and when is it
not to some extent? — it must be demanded that its technique is not visible;
nothing must be obviously present on a print that in any way interferes with,
or lowers, or falsifies, the photographic appearance or value. I must confess
to actually disliking his model for No. 214; the expression and the distorted
hands are very distressful and not the sort I would ask for public exhibition.
It is called Harmony, but the face has not a singing-mouth, and the instru-
ment, whatever it may be—some sort of dulcimer, I suppose—is so all but
invisible as to carry not the slightest pictorial value or meaning; one only
worries, therefore, as to the possible occupation of the clutching fingers.
Would any painter so neglect the all-important accessory in such a way?
Compare any of Kossuth’spictures introducing, as he was so fond of doing,
an ancient musical instrument. If it was a merely technical photographic
difficulty, why should so capable a worker as Clarence White shirk its
solution?
There is another leading American worker I want to say some hard
words about, viz., Mr. Joseph T. Keiley, for his is often a type of work