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

“MR. STIEGLITZ ON THE PERSONAL FACTOR IN AUTOCHROME.
The following extract from a letter to hand from Mr. Stieglitz, which we have had his permission
to publish, was written under the impression that the writer in the Daily Telegraph referred
to had sufficient knowledge of the process and its results to give his opinion weight. We are
informed that when the paragraph in question was penned he had seen no representative work
on the Autochrome plates whatever. But the value of Mr. Stieglitz’s views does not depend
on the triviality or otherwise of the occasion that called them forth.
Why does a writer in the Daily Telegraph of August 23 rush into print
and jump at erroneous conclusions not only about the Autochrome process,
but about myself? I have overlooked nothing in considering the Lumière
method of producing color photographs, I can assure him.
No one realizes more fully than I do what has been accomplished so far
in color photography, what really beautiful results have occasionally been
achieved in press color printing, and also in the other color processes thus
far invented—Ives' Chromoscope, Lippmann, etc.* It is even my good
luck now to be in Munich, where color printing is probably carried to the
most perfect degree of the day, and where Dr. Albert—undoubtedly one of
the greatest of all color experimenters as far as theory and practical achieve-
ment are concerned—has his laboratory and his plant. I have seen him;
seen his newest experiments and latest results, and these, I can assure my
readers, are in their way as remarkable as Lumières are in theirs. His
methods are mostly still unpublished, and the world knows but little of what
he has in store for it. A revolution as far as the production of color plates
for letter-press printing is concerned is close at hand, thanks to Albert's
genius.
Albert is a rare man in more ways than one ; his is a scientific mind
combined with a goodly portion of natural artistic feeling. Upon my
showing him Steichen’s color transparencies he granted at a glance — the
glance of a student and expert — that in color photography he had seen
nothing quite so true and beautifully rendered as Shaw’s hands and wrists.
Probably nothing in painting has been rendered more subtly, more lovingly,
than has been by the camera in this instance.
We all realize that the Lumière process is far from perfection. It has
its limitations, like every other process, but these limitations are by no means
as narrow as we were originally led to believe.
We know that for the present at least the rendering of a pure white †
seems impossible. Yet, artistically considered, this is not necessarily a fault.
The photographer who is an artist and who has a conception of color will
know how to make use of it. Steichen’s newer experiments, as well as those
now being made by Frank Eugene and myself, have proven to our satisfac-
tion that the Lumière method has quite some elasticity, and promises much
that will be joyous and delightful to even the most sensitive eye.
Certain results I have in my mind’s eye may eventually lead to endless
controversy similar to that waged not so very long ago about sharpness and
diffusion, and to that now being waged about “straight” and “ crooked ”

*Etc. includes Joly, Sanger Shepherd, Brasseur, Pinatypie, Miethe, McDonough and others.
† Read scientifically pure white.—Editor.

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