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

loses dainty charm thereby, it is a work to be welcomed. The sprite in the
shallow water in the foreground is nicely long-legged, but the water-surface
should have been better worked out — why will workers shirk this most
interesting problem—the wetness of water ?
This makes a conclusion to any remarks on the American exhibitors,
and if they seem unduly adverse that must be taken as a sort of compliment,
for it implies that something was attempted and was good enough in that
aspect to deserve critical treatment. Negative praise or dispraise helps
nothing and nobody, and the proper attitude for a Salon reviewer is that of
Iago — “nothing, if not critical."
Though I must not let my pen run to such lengths in reviewing the
English and Continental work, yet there are sufficient subscribers over here
to Camera Work to warrant their having a share of my very personal criti-
cisms. Of our French neighbor's work one naturally turns first to that of
Robert Demachy, and indeed I think for consummate success his L'Effort,
No. 81, is the most pronounced example of the exhibition. Of all things
in the gallery this is to me the supremely covetable one, though there are a
half-dozen other things that run it close. It does not affect me as greatly
photographic; it is too much miraculously complete and successful to be
wholly that; but the posing of the picture and the suggestion of movement
is so rarely fine, and the gradations everywhere are of such distinction that
the whole affects me as a most searching piece of draughtsmanship might.
The color is rich and soft to a marvelous degree, and I would call attention,
for this incomparable effort is sure to be seen in America sooner or later
(in fact, Mr. Stieglitz purchased the print, together with a few others of the
best things shown in the exhibition, for his private collection) to the extreme
felicity of the gail, gesture and placing of the approaching figure on the right.
What an amount of hard work this betokens to get all the figures so exactly
right for the momentous exposure ! If it is wholly due to camera-work, and
its many delightful passages of gradation not wholly due to the subtleties of
skilful brush-development of the gum-print, one can only be the more
astonished at the possibilities open to serious students with the camera.
Even if mainly due to the artist's brush-development, again it only shows
what the camera, plus perfect printing, can accomplish. No. 164, Mr.
Demachy'sLa Seine, is another extraordinary lesson in the variety and
subtlety of planes of distance possible to the skilled artist. Here is perhaps
the finest example attainable of the power in differentiation open to the
camera; the lesson in research this picture affords is most valuable. I think
the girders are a trifle hard, rigid, insistent; their edges seem a little too cut
out, but their color is so rich and strong and helps the series of distances so
well as to make it a point not worth dwelling on.
How such work strengthens one’s anger with the trivialities, the ill-
thought, ill-worked-out nothings that I have been inveighing against. We
can not all be masters of this rank, but we might all have the same desire for
completeness of effort. Mr. Demachy's two woodland-studies, No. 48 and
No. 80, so different in conception, one a delicate snow-study, and one a somber

44