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

its aims constitutes the greatest recognition it has thus far achieved. It marks
a milestone in the recognition of photography as a means of individual
expression. In the next number of Camera Work we hope to deal with
this particular exhibition more fully.

THE MEMBERS’ EXHIBITION AT THE
LITTLE GALLERIES — AN IMPRESSION.
O these are the gleanings of another year. The impression of the
whole is less immediately striking than formerly, possibly due to
the absence of large work. And yet, curiously enough, those
whose work in the past was said to have owed to its largeness the
public attention lavished on it, still hold the attention of the public; while
some of those who have sought to make their work more impressive through
enlarged presentment thereof seem materially to have weakened it by such a
course. Before some of the prints, ambitious in their effort, one finds
oneself sighing and saying: uThis one has come under the influence of the
other; individuality has been weakened in unconscious simulation. The work
has charm, but its values are faulty, and its maker seems somehow to have lost
himself.” Compared with these, the little, delicate, unpretentious landscapes
in the other room are masterpieces in honesty and realness of expression.
Some of the large portrait heads challenge attention by their half bilious and
wholly galvanized insistence. The heads thrust themselves out of their
backgrounds, instead of setting back therein. They are nearly all of an
unpleasant clay-like complexion (that bespeaks an improper use of mercury
in their development) that gives each a rather dirty and disagreeabie look.
Somehow they lack refinement and subtlety. There is one little Forest
Snow scene that is a gem, one of the most perfect imaginable: and there are
several gum prints that are melancholy enigmas. There is a fragmentary
nude and a large profile head that are all but faultless and classic in their
conception and treatment: while a charming Florentine composition leaves
little to be desired. A curious placidity and unobtrusiveness of the creative
imagination pervades the exhibition, such as forces the few exceptions to that
rule into violent contrast. Vigorous and splendid in its imagination and
poetry is the work of a Western woman, who for some years has been
steadily forcing her way to the front. Her love of nature and its dramatic
side has awakened in her fancy, dreams that recall some of the choicest
episodes of the old Latin poets; that of Baucis and Philemon, for example,
or of the Northern Sagas. Of all the work shown these few prints alone
approach expressing any grandeur of conception or sublimity of fancy. To
judge from the examples shown there are just two exhibitors who can lay
claim, by reason thereof, to mastership in the art they profess—whose work
shows unflagging creative imagination—rhythmically refined and delicately
charming in the one instance, dramatically pictorial and vigorously delightful
in the other. Curiously sensitive to rhythmic charm of line, the one presents
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