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

had been published of her, they came to hearken earnestly to her words and
teachings, and in many cases to follow her example. The retouched, unreal,
unatmospheric, stiff-posed, head-rested abominations, have almost completely
disappeared from the showcases of the leading professional workers through-
out the country. In their places have appeared tastefully mounted, nicely
lighted, naturally posed studies, showing shadow, atmosphere, and often
good pictorial composition. Rudimentary art education for the professional
photographer is earnestly advocated, and the adoption of higher and more
individual standards urged. This, of course, would have come to pass
eventually in any event; but it is largely due to the influence of Mrs.
Käsebier’s work and personality that it has come so soon.
Working, not from necessity, but from sheer love of it, she has set up
the following as her artistic creed: That to accomplish artistic work, of any
individual worth, nature must be seen through the medium of the artist's intel-
lectual emotions, and that all the while the artist must be on his guard against
being led into artificial channels.
The wild-nature environments of her early childhood, with the semi-
savage and altogether picturesque element of Indian life, its dangers and its
poetry, have left indelible markings upon Mrs. Käsebier's character of the
breeziness of the open prairie and the fearless independence of the frontier.
The Indian she sees not through the eye of her mother—who was compelled
at times to hide with her children under the stage-coach seats for protection
from the bullets, and who was ever in fear of the swooping down upon the
little home of a band of roving braves — but through those of the child, who
found companionship in the trees and flowers of the forest, and who came
to look upon the Indian as part of that wild nature whose beauty she knew,
whose brutality she was too young to grasp. Viewing people and life through
the medium of her imagination and emotions; carried away sometimes by
the mere ravishment of color, sometimes by delight of line harmony or the
power of splendid massings of light and shade; swayed at times solely by
the dominating influence of strong personality — all of which she translates
into the pictorial language of her own imaginations or emotions — her
pictorial work, while necessarily uneven, is always forceful and never monoto-
nous. Sometimes it is masterful in tone values, or splendid in massing,
and correspondingly shortcoming in line.
Again, its line values dominate all else. In other instances all these are
forgotten in the rendering of the facial expression. This is due to the
intenseness of her nature, which impels her to throw herself entirely into the
immediate purpose of the moment. If that moment be perchance one of
those rare even with the greatest—when all things harmonize—when line,
tone, massing, subject, all are in accord and appeal equally, there comes into
being what is recognized universally as a masterpiece.
Her sitters are dominated by her personality and plastic to the molding
of her will, and she uses them to express the pictorial conception that they
have awakened in her imagination.
The influence of Mrs. Käsebier’s work is widespread, and is felt abroad

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