Camera Work: A Photographic Quarterly (1907 (Heft 19))

PHOTOGRAPHY, WHAT D’YE LACK ?



THIS is an attempt to define for myself a condition that I feel rather
than find in photography, the youngest of the arts. To me there is
an indefinite yet serious something lacking in the exhibits of those
who use photography as a medium of artistic expression. As Mr.
Stieglitz has asked me to write “ at any length and on any subject,” I am
enabled at last to sit down and analyze my photographic emotions.
I know photography only by its public displays, the exhibits at the
Photo-Secession galleries in New York, and the single specimens which
appear in public, for instance in Mrs. Käsebier's little showcase on Fifth
Avenue ; and I first met with it as an art at a series of unique semi-private
shows given in Boston some years ago by Mr. F. Holland Day, in his tiny,
green, Aubrey-Beardsley-like rooms at the top of a quaint old wooden house
in Pinckney Street, on the summit of Beacon Hill.
So this then is my basis. I am merely an interested and sympathetic
outsider. At the outset I was neither for nor against photography ; it made
its way with me solely by the sheer force of good work. My mind was open
—“a fair field and no favor” being my creed in matters pertaining to art-
and I hope to be able to keep it so.
Although I am indifferent as to whether photography goes up or down,
being a fatalist as to the progress of the arts, and believing with Whistler
that art happens, that it depends entirely on the individual worker, and that
we can do little to either accelerate or retard its progress, yet many’s the
argument I've had with painters who protested, a little too vehemently, that
photography was not and never could become one of the arts; for photog-
raphy's achievements in the field of decorative composition alone have been
astonishing, and it has already in this respect left many of our best decorative
painters far in the rear.
I am enough a believer in photography to hold that a small gallery
should be devoted to photographic prints in each of our American art
museums, beginning with the Metropolitan, or at least with those museums
which have print rooms, in which are displayed etchings, engravings and the
like.

The camera is to me merely a tool with which artistic temperaments
express themselves, taking its place in line with the painter’s brush, the
sculptor’s chisel, the etcher's needle and the potter’s wheel.
All of which is doubtless an old story to the readers of Camera Work,
but if the impressions which photography has made and still makes on me
are worth a reading by the workers in this art-craft, it will be because these
impressions have come to me uninfluenced by any reading or “talk” on the
subject. In fact, I have deliberately refrained from informing myself on
many points which have arisen in my mind since I started to prepare these
notes, because the purpose of this paper is to record emotions produced on a
rank outsider solely by the work. My very ignorance may have its value,
perhaps even show which way the wind of public opinion blows, and blazon