Camera Work: A Photographic Quarterly (1906 (Heft 14))

THE UNMECHANICALNESS OF PHOTOGRAPHY *
AN INTRODUCTION TO THE LONDON PHOTOGRAPHIC EXHIBITIONS.
BEFORE I resume the subject of the annual exhibitions of pictorial
photography, let me, in mere humanity, beg my fellow-journalists
of every degree not to continue the really desolating display of
clever ignorance — the most trying sort of ignorance — which has
raged ever since certain platitudes of mine last year were exten-
sively quoted, requoted, and quoted yet again, as startling and outrageous
paradoxes.
It happens that for the moment we have our minds sufficiently open
and active on the subject of photography to be rather aggressively conscious
of its limitations, whilst we are at the same time so reconciled by long usage
to the very same limitations in painting that we have become unconscious
of them. That is why we think nothing of citing a dozen of the most
obvious drawbacks to easel-work and throwing them in the teeth of pho-
tography as if we had never met with them in any other pictorial method.
But this is not the worst. Critics who have never taken a photograph
elaborately explain why the camera can not do what every painter can do, the
instance chosen being generally of something that the camera can do to per-
fection and the painter not at all. For example, one writer has taken quite
pathetic pains to demonstrate the inferiority of the camera to the hand as an
instrument of portraiture. The camera, he explains, can give you only one
version of a sitter: the painter can give you a hundred. Here the gentleman
hits on the strongest point in photography, and the weakest point in draughts-
manship, under the impression that he is doing just the reverse. It is the
draughtsman that can give you only one version of a sitter. Velasquez, with
all his skill, had only one Philip; Vandyke had only one Charles; Tenniel has
only one Gladstone; Furniss only one Sir William Harcourt; and none of
these are quite the real ones. The camera, with one sitter, will give you
authentic portraits of at least six apparently different persons and characters.
Even when the photographer aims at reproducing a favorite aspect of a
favorite sitter, as all artist-photographers are apt to do, each photograph
differs more subtly from the other than Velasquez's Philip in his prime
differs from his Philip in his age. The painter sees nothing in the sitter but
his opinion of him: the camera has no opinions: it has only a lens and a
retina. One reply to this is obvious. It is that if I only knew how stupid
a painter can be, I would admit that many painters have no opinions, no
mind, nothing but an eye and a hand. Granted; but the camera has an eye
without a hand; and that is how it beats even the stupidest painter. The
hand of the painter is incurably mechanical: his technique is incurably artifi-
cial. Just as the historian has a handwriting which remains the same whether
he is chronicling Elizabeth or Mary, so the painter has a hand-drawing which
remains the same, no matter how widely his subjects vary. And it is because
the camera is independent of this hand-drawing and this technique that a
*Reprinted from The Amateur Photographer, October 9, 1902.
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