Camera Work: A Photographic Quarterly (1908 (Heft 21))

mistaken for the true personal touch. The musician orders through sounds
and silences, leading the mind, we know not how, agreeably from one note to
the other. All art is a matter of order, and nothing else, and where order
has been produced, art has been produced.
Let us now see how the truths we have been gathering apply to pho-
tography; and let us first see if photography is capable of order; for if it is
not, it is not possessed of the basis essential to all the fine arts, and we need
proceed no further. Let us examine portraiture.
If a photographer should photograph his sitter just as he happened
into his studio, the result would, with an almost absolute certainty, not be a
composition. But if he were to exercise his sense of order, and arrange the
folds of the dress, the action of the figure, the background, and light and
shade into a composition, and then photograph it, he would produce a work
of art. To this proposition, it is frequently objected that the posed model
would be the work of art, and the photograph only a photograph of a work
of art. If this is true, the portrait-painter, who brings to bear all his imagina-
tion and taste in posing his model, and then copies what he sees, is not
making a work of art. The proposition is absurd. The posing of the model
is only a means to an end—of course, if it is a tableau vivant that the artist
is striving for, why then, that being the end, it itself becomes the work of art.
The question of composing a landscape is more difficult, as every
photographer knows. Landscapes can not be easily composed. The order
must be found. I know that it is generally held that nature herself will
never make a picture. I also know that until recently it was universally
maintained that it was impossible to talk to a person a thousand miles away.
But that nature does compose, is proven by the fact that straight photo-
graphs of her have been made, which fulfill all the demands of perfect
composition. How, and why, nature composes, and how, and why, philoso-
phers have fallen into the error of arrogating the power of composition to
man alone, is a subject which it would take us even longer to investigate
than the present one. It is sufficient for our purpose to know that she does
compose, and that the photographer can transfix her compositions to his
negative. But let it be noted, fallacious as the proposition may appear, that
the full credit for any such composition belongs to the photographer who
has seen it, and seized it; for it is just as difficult to see and grasp the mean-
ing of a natural composition, as it is, by the painter’s more lazy method, to
get a little piece here, and another little piece there, and glue them together
according to the rules of the studio. In fact, if the truth be known as
intelligent painters know it, the artist really never composes at all; he
merely hunts nature for bits to make into such a whole as he has once
actually seen, but which he was unable, owing to its fleetness or other reason,
to transcribe to canvas.
Having now shown that a photograph can be a composition; that it
can contain that basic life, which all works of art must contain, let us ask,
through what manner of flesh, through what symbols, does the composition
manifest itself to our senses. The only possible answer is, through scientific

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