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

more could one ask for in a work of art? I am not comparing this photo-
graph with Monet’s color work and saying that Mr. Stieglitz could do the
same thing that Monet did and better, but I am saying that photography
can get the spirit of architecture in a certain peculiar way which no man
working with another tool can hope to rival.
A man who will stand with a camera at a window for four weeks,
driving all his friends and relatives to drink from watching him, in order to
catch just the right moment for taking a snap shot, is an artist. In fact, he
comes pretty near to being a genius, for he possesses the capacity for taking
infinite pains. He approximates that artist in horticulture, Luther Burbank,
who examined seventeen thousand blackberry bushes to make sure of
getting the best one of the lot for a certain prospective experiment in cross-
breeding.
The other worker in photography who took seventy-two photographs
of a subject and used only one, worked in a different way to the same end
when he destroyed his seventy-one unused negatives. But the long study
of the subject before actually making the negative is the better way, I am
inclined to think. It is more like the Japanese method of making their art-
pupils study a flower, a plant, a blade of grass for days and days before
putting pen, or rather in their case, brush to paper. After all, art is merely
seeing. The function of art being to teach us to see; the artist who sees
best and most thoroughly himself before making the record of an impression
will be the one who will most vividly convey that impression to others.
However, the real strength of at least the Photo-Secession part of the
photographic movement lies not in those material expressions of their art
feeling, but in the spirit back of them, which is extraordinary in its single-
mindedness and its devotion. Of course, the workers have had their
troubles, but few groups in the history of art have held together so well.
The best photographers of all countries, taken together, make but a small
group and they doubtless recognize the fact, even if some of them appar-
ently do it sub-consciously, that upon them rests the whole future of this new
art. If they fail to do their utmost, individually or collectively, although as
an art it can not die, it will be retarded for many years in the natural, health-
ful progress it otherwise will make.
The American workers should find a double inspiration in the fact that
the movement centers in this country. It is practically the only art move-
ment in which we are actually at the head of the procession. The position
brings a double burden with it, but if the enthusiasm and determination
which have been manifested during the past years are maintained, as there is
every reason to believe that they will be, the strength for carrying the load will
come without conscious effort, the secret of it all being in joyous work. We
not only hasten with delight to labor that we love but we do a lot of it with-
out exhaustion. And it is this sort of work that is permanent, that is laying
a solid foundation for this new art; for in the arts that which is done with-
out conscious effort by a really big man is his best work. At such times
the artist knows what inspiration is. He becomes nothing more than a
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