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

THE STRAIGHT AND THE MODIFIED PRINT.*

THERE is still a misunderstanding on the subject of the
straight print, as opposed to the modified print. Some
champions of pure photography, as it is called, will even
deny that a modified print is a photograph at all. For
my part, I believe that if the X deposit forming an image
is built up by the action of light, under the shadow of
another image, transparent, and also due to light action,
the result must be a photograph, whatever modifications
the photographer has thought proper to introduce amongst the relative pro-
portions of the deposit.
What we call in French “ l'intervention ” consists in purposely adding
to or substracting from certain parts of the photographic deposit. In the
case of addition, the extra thickness will be identical in substance to the
primitive deposit (glycerine-developed platinotype and Rawlins’process).
This practice of intervention, forbidden by pure photographers when applied
to the positive print, is recommended by the same school when applied to
the negative, and is then called intensification or reduction, general or local.
Its final effect is similar to that of the positive intervention, viz., modifica-
tion in the general or local thickness of the positive deposit. The whole
question lies in this diminutive nutshell.
Straight result or modified result — one has to choose. It stands to
reason that a genuine straight photograph must owe every subsequent trans-
formation to the first action of light on the film of the negative. This
negative must neither be intensified nor reduced—no paint must be dabbed
on to its back — no pencil-strokes on its face, no shading to part of its
surface during exposure must be allowed. The same strict rules will be
applied to the development, if any, of the positive print. For if we admit
that the faking that photographers have indulged in for the last fifty years is
legitimate, but that similar faking, under other names and by more effective
methods, is not, we are acting like overgrown children.
I maintain that if I have the right, as a photographer, to lower the
density of part of my negative with Farmer’s reducer, I have the equal right
not to use the reducer, and to darken the corresponding part of my positive
print by piling on pigment with the Rawlins stenciling-brush; that if I have
the right, as a photographer, to dab color on a definite portion of my nega-
tive, in order to add to its density, and thus create a white spot on my
positive print, I have an equal right to leave my negative alone, and to wipe
off the colored gum deposit on my print on the corresponding spot, and for
the same purpose. Words will not stand against facts, and these facts, I
believe, are in logical sequence.
The limit? Well, there is no limit except extreme black on one side
and extreme white on the other. For nobody, except a few professional
photographers, and those of no very high order, has ever attempted to paint


*Reprinted from the Amateur Photographer, London.