Camera Work: A Photographic Quarterly (1907 (Heft 20))

IN PRAISE OF PHOTOGRAPHY.

IT is very interesting to be in at the birth of an art. This is the
privilege of those who are watching the steady advance of the
Photo-Secession and their European associates. In the best of
this work it seems to me that these men already have proved that
photography can do certain things that can not be accomplished by any other
medium. This will appear a horrifying assertion to a hide-bound laborer in
one of the older arts, but once granted that the camera is an art tool it is a
perfectly logical statement. It would be a strange tool that could not
achieve something that no other tool could do.
To record purely individual impressions, even impressions of the
moment, two instances that stand out most vividly before me are connected
with a a series of studies of the nude made in collaboration by Mr. Clarence
H. White and Mr. Alfred Stieglitz, and a " snap shot”—a snap shot which
lasted four weeks, however, for the mental exposure—by Mr. Stieglitz
working alone. This is not saying that there are not other prints in these
classes as good, or even better—although I do not quite see how that could be
—but it is merely taking some extraordinarily beautiful examples as illustra-
tions for my argument, for they are certainly special feats in the rendition of
architecture and the nude.
In the very best one of the series of nudes, made from an unusually
fine subject, there is a delicacy of modeling in the torso, and a peculiarly
elusive and subtle play of shadow over exquisite surfaces which after all only
the camera in the hands of a master could catch. No human hand could
render it in this way in any medium.
This brings us at once to the question," Yes, but was it worth doing ? ”
No one who is sensitive to beauty, no matter what his previous prejudices
may have been, could hold this print in his hand and fail to enjoy it and be
true to his own art, whatever it might be. If it is worth doing, then the
camera has no rival, for this is the truth of beauty, or to put it in another
way the beauty of truth. Given a beautiful subject to start with, a master
who can fairly make his camera see, can get a result that is not only beautiful
but that comes pretty near to absolute truth. And if a beautiful thing is
seen beautifully, absolute truth in the rendering of the artistic vision is a
desideratum indeed. This brings us to the fact that in photography beauty
in the model is of prime importance, as defects in line and modeling in the
subject can not be—or rather, as an advocate of pure photography I believe
should not be—corrected by hand.
In the architectural subject is to be seen an admirable demonstration of
the fact that it is possible to get the spirit of architecture by photography as
truly as Monet got it in his twelve wonderful studies of Rouen cathedral in
various atmospheric phases and at different times of day and night. In
addition, there can be obtained an absolute accuracy of drawing—truth again,
you see—that mortal mind can not even grasp, and it can be rendered as im-
pressionistically as may be desired. Delicacy and strength and truth—what


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