Camera Work: A Photographic Quarterly (1907 (Heft 18))

and interest was manifested in it by thousands. The Camera Club was
founded, and in its early days was a social center for pictorial workers,
although these were only a small minority of its members.
Photography was now to feel the effects of the sweeping change in art
which characterized the last quarter of the nineteenth century. In 1888,
Dr. P. H. Emerson published " Naturalistic Photography,” a work which has
been compared to a bombshell dropped into the midst of a tea-party. Mani-
festations of the change, as far as pictures were concerned, were shown at the
exhibition of the Royal Photographic Society in 1890. Davison’s "Onion
Field” took the photographic world by storm. Photography had taken
little count of the trend of art, and when Emerson and Davison drew
attention to it with a jerk, old-fashioned toilers at composite photography
found the ground moving from under their feet, and their palace of art, a
respectable stucco-fronted mansion, collapsing over their heads. The earth-
quake passed away, but its effects remain to this day. Impressionism was to
have its place in photography as in the other graphic arts; and the convention-
alities and unreality of thirty years were left behind in three. “Naturalism ”
was the text preached from by Davison, Emerson, and others, and their
influence was immediately seen in exhibitions, both in subject and in treat-
ment. Davison had gone to the Essex marshes for some of his best-known
pictures, and a weekly exodus toward Canvey Island and the Blackwater
followed, which must have had its eflfect upon the dividends of the Great
Eastern Railway. It followed that going down into Essex, photographers
must need discover Constable’s country, and the discovery was not without
its result on English photographic landscape. The “Mud Flat School,” as
it was termed, broadened in its views until its name ceased to be appropriate.
The characteristic of present-day photographic work in this country is
its atmosphere, its appreciation of the beauty of cloud-form, and the reliance
often placed upon the sky to provide the real subject of the picture. These,
of course, have always been essential features of British landscape art, and in
this photography is at one with painting. But mediocrity seems to be the
note to-day, and the center of interest, as far as pictorial photography is
concerned, has shifted across the Atlantic. No one seeing our exhibitions year
by year can fail to observe that, while the number of workers of some note
has increased, there has been no increase in the interest of the pictures shown.
Some have explained it as a leveling up, others call it stagnation.
Certain it is that the leaders of ten or fifteen years ago have been caught up
by those who followed them; but it is not so easy to determine whether this
is due to the progress of the one or the lack of movement of the other.
The great increase in numbers has been brought about by the extraordinary
simplicity and ease of modern methods, which have attracted thousands to
photography who would never have thought of it otherwise. Here and
there amongst the number have been some who realized that the amusement
of an idle hour might be made much more, and that in the camera they
might have a means of expression, which lack of inclination or lack of
training had prevented them from finding in the pencil.

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