Camera Work: A Photographic Quarterly (1907 (Heft 17))

fully successful. It is, to my mind, horribly marred by the affectation of
the roughly-torn edges of the paper it is printed on. The girls are dainty
and daintily-dressed dears; why not send them out on a dainty and daintily-
exact mount ? Mr. J. P. Hodgins (Canada) has a most imaginatively
treated avenue of trees, full of somber grandeur, though it is misleading
in its title of “ Landscape."
Alvin Langdon Coburn's (America) examples are in much the same
vein as last year, while fully as characteristic and forceful. I like “ Spider's
Webs ” much for its water treatment; this also seems a bad title, as there is
nothing circular or radiating in the lines of rigging, and I would like to cut
off the heavy piece of opaque reflection at the bottom, which has too little
at the top as its counterpart to have a full meaning, and only suggests the
beginning of a new composition, rather than the completion of this one.
“ The Rudder” has been widely praised, and deservedly so, for it is a suc-
cessful study of action, and of values in shadows, while the masses and lines
are quite imposing. His “ Rodin ” gives the man, the great man, the
thinker and worker, more truly than any other version I have seen; it is
quite one of the best pieces of portraiture this clever young man has
achieved, and is a valuable legacy to contemporary records of our great men.
The nude Bernard Shaw, “ Le Penseur,” “naked and unashamed,” is an
excellent exercise in sunlit flesh-tones, well modeled and given, except for
the indeterminate treatment of the lower half of the legs and the feet. It
also reveals the fact that Mr. Shaw’s vegetarianism is nourishing enough to
fully confound his opponents. The one objection I have to it as an
exhibition-piece is that it seems to imply that Mr. Shaw does his thinking
in this nude condition, a quite unnecessary piece of information. If it is
meant to convince us that vegetarianism is as nourishing as a flesh diet, it
should not have been called “ Le Penseur,” while, if that title is given to
convey the information that Mr. Shaw'shistrionic genius is sufflcient to
enable him to reproduce Rodin's famous statue in the flesh, then the
recognizability of the face is a mistake, for that locates the thinker as G. B. S.,
and not merely gives, as Rodin's statue does, an impersonal semblance of a
thinker. The fact is it is an amusing and successful bit of work, but it is
not, therefore, necessarily suitable for public exhibition. One resents this
giving our only important playwright such a cheap advertisement; he is far too
valuable to the world at large to be minimized in this way. Mr. Herzog's
(America) “Alas, Poor Yorick ! ” is amazingly clever and painstaking; but
why a girl for the Hamlet ? And who are the girls on either hand ? I
seem to remember that when Hamlet made that famous apostrophe, his
auditors were but Horatio and the First Gravedigger.
Mr. Alexander Keighley's (England) work is, as usual, most interesting
and picturelike; marvels of enlarging from the luckiest, or most consummate,
of hand-exposures. His “Calle del Duomo, Chioggia,” would be the best
he has done, but for its poor and thin color, and for its weak sky, which has
no depth in it or true lighting; but the whole makes a splendid piece of
composition — grand and ennobling, and true to the spirit of the place.

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