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

last year was a joke! They believe that my object in the twenty years' work
I have done as a critic has been to gain a reputation to fool away for their
amusement. Happy egotists ! As to the leading photographic journal,
which insists so irritably that “ every intelligent photographer has long since
satisfied himself that it is absurd to claim for any kind of photography what-
soever the distinction of being a fine art,” I can imagine an honest white-
washer, hearing rumors of the Arts and Crafts revival, and terrified at the
prospect of being dragged out of his depth by demands for “tone” in areas
and passages, proclaiming that “ every painter in the trade knows that it is
absurd to claim for any kind of brush-work whatever the distinction of being
a fine art.” Still, without pretending to take such petuiances seriously, I can-
not look round the exhibitions without sympathizing with the veterans who
indulge in them. For there is something more in them than the protest of
the chemist and optician against the intrusion of the follies of the studio into
his laboratory. The fact is that photography is being taken up by painters
and draughtsmen; and they are importing into the dark-room the imperfec-
tions and corruptions of the methods which have come down to us from the
stone age. These old methods are such arrant makeshifts that artists have
always been forced to make a merit of each makeshift by cultivating the
utmost virtuosity in its employment. This virtuosity in the artist calls for
its corresponding connoisseurship in the critic; and the result is that fine art
becomes a game of skill in which the original object of the skill is constantly
being lost sight of; so that the genuinely original men who recall this object
by periodical “ returns to nature ” are vehemently abused and ridiculed, not
because their works are not like nature, but because they are not like
pictures.
Hence, if you take an artist out of the Parisian ateliers, and give him a
camera to work with, what happens? He immediately sets to work to pro-
duce, not photographs, but the sophisticated works of art which formerly
attracted him to the painter's profession. His very first blunder in exposure,
especially underexposure, may result in a negative which a skilled tradesman
would instantly scrub off the glass. The artist-novice makes a print from it,
and finds that he has got something like what he calls an impression. Trained
as he is to make merits of makeshifts in the atelier, he is not slow to make a
merit of a mistake in the dark-room. He very soon finds out that though
his proceedings involve a great deal of what a London shopkeeper described
to me the other day as the backbone of his photographic trade: namely,
waste of materials by amateurs, yet an encouraging proportion of his plates,
especially those which, if turned out by a skilled member of the trade, would
lead to instant and precipitous loss of employment, give prints which have
many of the qualities of those early makeshifts of Impressionism in which
tone was achieved by a frank sacrifice of local color and local drawing. If he
is really an artist, the blunders he selects for exhibition will be more interest-
ing than the unselected technical successes of the photographer who is not
an artist. He soon learns how to produce these happy blunders intentionally,
at which point, of course, they cease to be blunders and become crimes.

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