Camera Work: A Photographic Quarterly (1906 (Heft 13))

artistic impulses, Mr. Coburn'scontributions are as worthful as anything in
the gallery. No. 162, London Bridge in Sunlight, is perhaps the very truest
rendering of sunlight photography has yet achieved. Lines, composition,
masses, sense of movement in the people, all are super-excellent, while truth
to tone and atmosphere are nothing short of marvelous. It is emphatically
one of the pictures of the year. It appeals to me especially, as it is so
entirely due to direct, true, and inescapable photography, and yet is as full of
the artist’s, the painter’s intention. It is a veritable triumph for the camera.
Mr. Coburn’s five portraits are remarkable for their largeness of manner,
their striking insistence on the individuality of the sitter, and withal for their
picture-making qualities. They are particularly valuable, as they are so
inevitably pure photographic work. Such things as these again prove that
the camera is all right as an artistic tool, if you can only get the right man
behind it.
Mr. Clarence White’s work alternately repels and attracts me; it is so
often so curiously complete and successful; informed by all that is artistic
and technically good in some works, and yet in others as curiously negligent,
uninformed, and unworked-out. No. 134, The Kiss, is very beautiful, quite
successful in every way, though a most difficult subject to work out to so
complete an end, so fully yet so restrainedly. The only drawback to its
sense of originality is that it too vividly recalls the Paolo and Francesca, by
D. G. Rossetti. But for all that, it holds its own, and is quite one of the
most beautiful things Mr. White has made. No. 135 is a puzzle to me ; it
appears to be a study from the nude, but where came that impossible mon-
ster of a globe from ? The title says A Statuette and Crystal Globe, but there
is nothing in the surface treatment to suggest either clay, plaster, or marble ;
and the size and placing of the figure does not in the least suggest a small
statuette. It is a charming thing as it is, but one can’t help puzzle over it,
and that no work of art should give rise to. No. 170 is not fully successful
in its treatment. It is a genre picture, and should therefore be fully worked
out all over. The blurring of the contours by the too large aperture of the
lens and the lack of precision in outline in the background accessories are
inadmissible, and only serve to distract from the full enjoyment of the beau-
tifully placed and lighted figure. I am sure no painter would have treated
such a subject in such a loosely defined manner. Mr. White’s greatest suc-
cess here is in No. 191, Portrait of Mrs. White, a quite painter-like treatment
of an admirably placed figure, with a really beautiful sense of space in the
room behind her. The subordination of the accessories and background,
yet without any loss of understanding of them, is in quite a fine manner, and
the whole ranks the maker of it as a master indeed. But No. 181 is to me
as distressingly weak as the other is fine; lines, arrangement, massing,
lighting (is there any definite lighting?), all are technically poor and inefficient.
It is called A Study in Composition, but where does it come in, if we consider
the huddlement of the figure on the floor, the position and perspective of
the half-chair, the drawing of the lower hand and arm? The only possible
merit is in some good lines in the draped skirt; but it is surely not a work
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