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

those among us who can gather up these fallen mantles and assume them with the dignity which they
deserve! Yet who shall say that these be borrowed, but rather with more truth that like causes
bring like effects, and that it is the principles of art which are known and practiced? When these
are put in motion modern work will always be coterminous with that of a former day.
Applying these to the severely modern subject we get in Mr. Stieglitz’s “Race Track"—not
only a theme dear to the heart of the horse-lover, but an expression which causes the art-lover,
who perhaps has gone over to automobiles or may regard racing as wicked, to pause and enjoy it
because of its beauty as a mere piece of decoration. So, too, with his locomotives spouting up
their columns of vertical smoke. Here it is not only dignity of simple mass but the esthetic
attractiveness of the vertical line, the most commanding in art, and that other line so valuable, the
curvilinear, conveyed through the series of tracks. His charming portrait of the Vienna beauty
“Miss S. R.” has received in the decorative forms above the head that encasement which lifts it
out of portraiture into a higher plane.
That added something which has to do the lifting in so many cases, the lever raising one’s
work above the ordinary, what is it but a knowledge of how to apply the art-principles in given
cases? Mrs. Käsebier beautifully exploits two of these in her picture, “The Sketch," which is not
only a young girl against a low wall making a sketch of a distant landscape, but a pattern of space-
filling masses of light and shade, and this consideration should be a close second to the idea. Indeed
there is a school of art which places that first. But of this in a later number. Look, too, at her
“Magic Crystal, for the inclusiveness of its line and its ensemble as decoration.
Striking examples of what may be accomplished with the decorative opportunities of light and
shade, graduation, balance of forces, and pure line, each playing its part as related with the space
limitations of the frame, may be studied in “Wier’s Close—Edinboro," by A. L. Coburn; “The
Web” and “Wandering Brush,” W. B. Dyer; “April Showers," W. F. James; “An Indian
Head,” J. F. Keiley; “April," F. H. Pratt; “Dorothy Sutton’’ of remarkable quality by Mary
R. Stanbery; “La Cigale” and others by Frank Eugene.
Space is denied to mention others full worthy of notice—but sufficient for the point at hand.
Here the brazen serpent has been lifted up in the wilderness of the ordinary. It is by no
means the only brazen serpent in this country, but it is warranted to cure any who have that
common disease of which we speak.
But see how history repeats itself: Those stubborn Israelites preferred not to look up. The
public has swarmed into these galleries and have gone away rejoicing. Few students of photography
have attended, and yet there are those on hand who will willingly converse with any who inquire
how it is done, declaring with genuine zeal that they have no secrets and are striving only to
advance the status and claims of photography through art.

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