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

himself pleads guilty—they basically and in a broad general way have been
reproached for being true to themselves and their medium when painters have
all the while been making photographs. What now does remain is the
complete demonstration of the superiority of the lens and of light in the
hands of an artist, over the brush and palette for the making of photographs.
I am personally willing to avoid the discussion of the subject and calmly
watch developments, feeling confident that even the most conservative critic
will soon discover the superiority, at least in portraiture, of photography
per se over the big majority of so-called portrait paintings; and that in another
direction a Winslow Homer, himself, may live to see a perfected cinemato-
graph, that has been operated by another Winslow Homer, exhibit represen-
tations of the Maine coast in color, with the possible accompaniment of
a phonograph, that will have all the great qualities of his canvases and
obviously more. It will have the heave and swell of the sea, the bigness of
space, and the wetness of things — the hardness of rock and dashing of the
spray—and the truthful color-renderings. It is bound to have these if
they existed in nature, and even these very qualities can be photographically
exaggerated, just as Homer himself might do them in paint. One thing
will be missing, the brilliant virtuoso performance of his brushwork—the
so-called technique. Camera photography can never compete with this.
In picturing nature this technique is the only element of personal equation
which the camera cannot, or rather will not, do better for the artist than paint
photography, and the state of things in the art of representation has come to
a strange period in its evolution when the manipulation of the brush and the
paint is its greatest reason for existence. Let it not be imagined that all this
is but a cocksure bandying of a great genius, for one considers Homer such,
even if one does not consider him a great artist—for a great artist would never
permit nature to fascinate him beyond his art and cause him to paint the
ugliest imaginable arrangements of color on a canvas, simply because they
existed in the “motif” before him. The great painter would find in this
motif that which would inspire him to paint a picture that must first and
foremost be beautiful in form and in color regardless of its physical represen-
tation of nature, otherwise it is only a photograph, and photography can
never be a great art in the same sense that painting can ; it can never create
anything, nor design. It is basically dependent on beauty as it exists in nature,
and not as the genius of the artist creates it. It is an art entirely apart
and for itself. Its successful developments, technically and artistically, of
to-day, are the definite proof of the fallacy of most modern painting; and
yet the greatest photograph of a living woman that can ever be made will be
much less beautiful than the Mona Lisa, just as nature is less beautiful than
art, and as the greatest Velasquez sinks into insignificance beside the gods of
granite of ancient Egypt. Eduard J. Steichen.

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