Camera Work: A Photographic Quarterly (1908 (Heft 23))

PAINTING AND PHOTOGRAPHY.


R. GEORGE BERNARD SHAW wrote an article a few

years ago, in which he conclusively demonstrated the un-
mechanicalness of photography, and expressed opinions that
brought forth prompt and profuse apologies to the public

from photographers and the photographic press. He was most generally
assailed for a statement that if Velasquez were living to-day he would be a
photographer instead of a painter; and by way of adding another photogra-

pher’s apology for this statement, I will have to go Mr. Shaw one better on
the same point and insist that Velasquez could hardly become more of a

photographer to-day than he already was in his own time, except that he

would surely use the camera to-day.
It is strange that we should so carefully cherish the fallacy that photog-
raphy began with Daguerre’s discovery; as far as the shareholders of the
Eastman Kodak Co. are concerned, there is no doubt about this being true,

but from the standpoint of pictorial art, photography dates back to earlier

days. When art began and when art flourished, as it did in Egypt, in
Persia, in China, in Japan, and in Greece, photography—the art of repre-
sentation—was undeveloped and unknown. The elements of beauty as
expressed in form, design and color were the whole of art, and the artists
knew art and created great works of art. Without pretending in any way
to go into the reasons, the causes, or a careful chronology of its evolution,
we find that art to-day reaches its greatest heights in the painting of pictures

and in these actually represents nature. The making of beautiful objects and
•things of ornament, and even of utility, have practically been banished from

the realm of art to the more active and more lucrative scope of commerce;
and that perfect expression of an artist’s conceit, the easel painting, has

become a very high grade of wall-paper, enclosed in a frame of gold, hung

regardless of its uses, intentions or environment, to be worshipped as the
great form of art.

With but few notable exceptions the gradual tendencies of painting
since about the time of Giotto have been towards a more complete and a

more perfect physical representation of nature. Since that time, light and
shade, and chiaroscuro, have become important elements in painting; then

atmosphere and the rendering of light; and finally the art of representation
reached such a climax in its development that we went beyond the surface

representation of things and even analyzed light and color in painting. We
have dubbed the minute detail painting of a Meissonier as photographic,

because it gave what we understood photography generally gave us—but the
analytical art of Monet and Sisley is a much greater step into the domain of
photography, for the Monet is simply a greater representation and a truer
one than the Meissonier—just as a White is a greater and more realistic

photograph than an H. P. Robinson.
When looking at a Japanese picture, a print by Kionaga, or at the
Sphinx, at the painting on a Greek vase, a gorgeous Chinese garment, a

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