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

sun ; this uniting of the negatives has killed the picture. One must stop at
a certain limit of rectification, which should be amply sufficient, and which
leaves to the work its sincerity, its charm of nature, which above all must
never be forgotten.”
ALEXANDRE CHARPENTIER
He is par excellence the sculptor of our modernity, which is realized in
his vast bas-reliefs relating to the crafts: “Les Boulangers’’; “LesMenuisiers”;
his innumerable plaquettes, portraits of contemporary celebrities; his busts and
his monument of Zola. He has been a marvelous renovator in the designing
of modern furniture and of decorative art. His pieces of furniture, his
objects of everyday use, formed a series of unique works of art extremely new
and distinguished.
“I find what you show me exceedingly interesting. Those prints have
a decided art value. I find the interpreted works interesting. Their authors
have shown artistic taste, but though I admire them, I nevertheless prefer
those that have remained more strictly photographs and which show quali-
ties of art, of emotion and of thought. All these results, all these experi-
ments are very interesting to the artist and on account of their remarkable
qualities. It is time for him to study them more carefully, in view of the
greater things which photography undoubtedly promises.”
COTTET
“The most impressive of all the painters of sombre Brittany. He has
been able to delineate with true feeling its characters, types and customs, in
a large number of paintings of the highest class; scenes of maritime and
peasant life, landscapes, marines, and so on. Savoy, Spain, and the Orient
also have given him inspiration for works which have made him one of the
glories of the French school.
“These photographs reveal a great deal of intelligence, and artistic tem-
peraments in the authors, but I must say that the greatest pleasure is given
to me by such as are purely photographic. I am not fond of those prints
which are retouched and transformed to death by processes of interpretation,
for then I find myself in the presence of a shocking clash between two differ-
ent methods. They show a confusion of planes, a lack of unity; on the one
hand the supple grandeur of drawing and on the other, and immediately
adjoining it, the smallness and dryness of photography. Photography, if it
bean art, is above all an art of precision, of representation ; it is going against
its very essence, against its qualities, to first obtain this precision in order to
destroy it immediately afterwards. To make the combination of the two
methods interesting, it would be necessary for a very great artist to take up
photography in its entirety, and then to intervene in all its parts, so that
there should be no lack of homogeneity; but then he would be a big enough

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