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

OUR ARTICLES.

THE editors of Camera Work wish to reiterate for the
nth time that the articles published in the magazine do
not necessarily reflect their own views. As a matter of
fact few of them do. It has been our policy — and it
will continue to be our policy—to print such articles as
we deem timely, interesting or provocative of ideas.
Mr. Herzog’s panel compositions having been the
photographic “ sensation ” of the year and having been
the subject of much discussion, not only among the
photographers but among the painters, we are glad to print the article
which appears in this number from the pen of Mr. Caffin, the art critic,
giving his impressions of these studies. We have no intention of com-
menting in any way upon Mr. Caffin's views, but feel that it may be
interesting, in passing, to supplement an incomplete statement made by him
of Mr. Herzog’s method of achieving some of his results. Mr. Caffin
alludes to Mr. Herzog’s composite groups, but omits to mention his actual
method of producing, let us say, The Banks of Lethe, assuming that he posed
the group of figures as rendered in that composition and then photographed it.
As a matter of fact Mr. Herzog proceeded approximately as follows:
having made innumerable single- or occasionally double-figure studies on
4x5 plates, and having made bromide enlargements from each of these nega-
tives, and having from these enlargements cut out the figures, paper-doll
fashion, he then proceeded, on a large panel, and with these figures and a
paper of pins, to group and re-group, arrange and re-arrange—in short, carry
on experiments in his “hunt for the line!” When finally the composition
satisfied his eye, he pasted down the pinned figures and with brush and pig-
ment filled the gaps and pulled together the sections of his composition.
Lastly, he photographed this result in various sizes, thus producing a
number of "original" negatives. From one of these the accompanying
photogravure was made without any tool work or retouching whatever.
At the Fourteenth Annual London Salon just held, the United States,
in comparison with recent years, was but sparsely represented, owing,
undoubtedly, to the circumstances that many of its well-known pictorialists,
Steichen, White, Eugene, Keiley, Dyer, Seeley, Stieglitz, Boughton, Schütze,
Brigman, etc., etc., had refrained from participating. Notwithstanding the
comparatively small number of American pictures shown in the exhibition-
thirty-seven in all, representing the following workers: Jeanne E. Bennett,
Sidney Carter, Fannie E. Coburn, Alvin Langdon Coburn, J. Mitchell Elliot,
Adelaide Hanscom, J. P. Hodgins, Gertrude Käsebier, Helen Lohmann,
W. B. Post, Frederick H. Pratt, W. Orison Underwood ( these all Photo-
Secessionists), Fedora E. D. Brown, A. S. Goss, J. E. Greene, F. Benedict
Herzog, F. B. Johnston, and Ema Spencer— Mr. Frederick H. Evans, who
had reviewed the Salons of 1904 and 1905 for Camera Work, was never-
theless commissioned by us to review the exhibition of 1906.


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