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

one print will have the artist’s signature all over it from the sky to the
ground, the other will be a meaningless muddle. For the man has intervened
in both cases. One has made a work of art out of a simply beautiful picture,
the other has probably spoiled its beauty and certainly has introduced no art.
The moral of this fable is twofold. It shows that a beautiful straight print
may be made by a man incapable of producing a work of art, and that a
straight print can not possibly be a work of art even when its author is an
artist, since it may be identical to that taken by a man who is no artist.
You will answer that a gum or an oil print from a master can be copied
by a patient and painstaking worker, just as the above beautiful motive was
stolen from the artist—well, you may try. I know of a man who has been
copying Steichen to the extent of having canvas background painted exactly
like the brush-developed background of one of his gum portraits. I prefer
not to speak of the result. That it was all to the credit of Steichen you may
believe.
Not once but many times have I heard it said that the choice of the
motive is sufficient to turn an otherwise mechanically produced positive into
a work of art. This is not true; what is true is that a carefully chosen motive
(beautiful, ugly or commonplace, but well composed and properly lighted)
is necessary in the subsequent evolution towards art. It is not the same
thing. No, you can not escape the consequences of the mere copying of nature.
A copyist may be an artist but his copy is not a work of art; the more
accurate it is, the worse art it will be. Please do not unearth the old story
about Zeuxis and Apelles, when the bird and then the painter were taken in.
I have no faith in sparrows as art critics and I think the mistake of the
painter was an insult to his brother artist.
The result of all this argument will be that I shall be taxed with having
said that all unmodified prints are detestable productions, fit for the waste-
paper basket, and that before locally developed platinotype, gum bichromate,
ozotype and oils, there were no artists to be found amongst photographers.
I deny all this. I have seen many straight prints that were beautiful and that
gave evidence of the artistic nature of their authors, without being, in my
private opinion, works of art. For a work of art is a big thing. I have also
seen so-called straight prints that struck me as works of art, so much so that
I immediately asked for some technical details about their genesis, and found
to my intimate satisfaction that they were not straight prints at all. I have
seen brush-developed, multi-modified gum prints that were worse—immeasur-
ably worse—than the vilest tintype in existence, and I have seen and have in
my possession straight prints by Miss Cameron and by Salomon, one of our
first professionals, just after Daguerre’s time, that are undoubtedly the work
of artists. All is not artistically bad in a straight print. Some values are often
well rendered; some “ passages ” from light to shade are excellent, and the
drawing can be good if proper lenses are used at a proper distance from the
motive; but there is something wanting, something all important, extremely
difficult to express in words. If you can see it there is no use trying to
describe it; if you do not, it is useless also, for you would not understand.

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