Camera Work: A Photographic Quarterly (1908 (Heft 24))

PICTORIAL PHOTOGRAPHY—
A SERIES OF INTERVIEWS
PHOTOGRAPHY has a very undesirable reputation amongst
the artists of our times. They know only the faults of its
extremely mechanical precision, its ordinary, commonplace
results, and the absence of feeling and of life which are
shown in its modern representations. They remember, too, much of its
distortions; of its impotence to render certain values, and of its lack of sensi-
bility ; they do not suspect that many of the faults which they attribute to
photography should be assigned to the photographers, nor have they any
knowledge that there is today a very well developed movement in pictorial
photography existing in many countries.
The artists know nothing of the many clever men who have made pho-
tography a medium of art expression, flexible and with convincing results.
They have not been familiar with the two or three principal magazines
devoted to the researches of pictorial photography; nor have they seen the
frequent international salons held in the different countries. Photography
for them is a source of scientific precision; an ideal method of quick repro-
duction; which, when it develops pretentions to art, gives in certain hands
special proof of an absolute ignorance of the first rudiments of art, and of a
mind and education truly lamentable.
The critics and the writers are in the same predicament. If one excepts
Maeterlinck, the author of the most profound essay which has been written
on this subject; and M. R. de la Sizeranne, the convinced champion of this
question in his finebook: “La Photographie est-elle un Art?” (“Is Photography
an Art?”), then there are no men of letters that have thought or written on
this subject. All over the world practically the same conditions prevail. If
we except the learned Bernard Shaw and a few other brilliant and rare minds,
it is perhaps in the United States, with Mr. Charles H. Caffln and a num-
ber of other earnest defenders of pictorial photography, that the most con-
vincing perspicacity has been shown.
It was with the idea of remedying these conditions a little, that I
thought it would be interesting to visit and to talk on this subject with cer-
tain artists, men of letters and important critics in France, and to interview
them on the following questions:
First: Do you believe that by means of photography, works of art can
be produced?
Second: Do you approve of interpretation by means of photography,
and the intervention of the photographer by the different means at his dis-
posal, to realize, according to his taste and in his own personal style, his
emotions?
Provided with various specimens of different styles of work, original prints
or American reproductions from Camera Work, of Mr. Steichen’s amongst
others; and with some beautiful examples of gum and oil prints by Demachy,
Puyo, and others, I saw successively men of varied talents and of widely

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