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

artist to be a painter or a designer and the photograph would be only the
basis to be worked upon. The result would never have the savor of a direct
work, a creation which is a manifestation of unaffected sentiment. I believe
that photography can have a value in art in sounding the laws of lighting, of
composition, and of avoiding distortions.”
CHERET
In a delightful play of color, of glistening harmonies, with a constant
search for gayety, light-heartedness, and joyousness between heaven and
earth, Cheret has evoked his beautiful, mad, moving personations of laughter,
love, and beauty. This accomplished pastelist, this learned decorator, this
rejuvenator of the artistic poster, is perhaps today—so much has he appealed
to all classes—the most popular and unquestioned leader of all colorists.
“I have already seen some very interesting photographs but never any
revealing so much intelligence. There are in these superb prints qualities of
art which it is impossible to deny; it would also be unjust to deny to their
authors the quality of artists, who knew, by one manner or another, to lift
photography out of all its usual banality and dryness. There are in some of
them defects which an artist acting with his pure will would have avoided;
softness here, hardness there, but these works are certainly for me a very pleas-
ing novelty and give me genuine pleasure.”
BARTHOLOME
A master of contemporary sculpture, a thinker, of refined and melan-
choly sentiment, such is he shown in his mysterious masterpiece of restrained
passion, resignation, and sorrow, “Le Monument aux Morts,” in the ceme-
tery of Pere la Chaise. He is an exquisite poet of youth and of the awaken-
ing of love, in his nudes in marble.
“ I am irritated by most of the photographs in which the authors have
intervened to create works that are no longer photographs and are not draw-
ings. They suggest to me only imperfect imitations of etchings or of repro-
ductions of paintings. Undoubtedly there are prints thus interpreted that
give a certain pleasure and which reveal artistic education, but they always
lack cohesion; and what difference do you often find between the photographer
who works thus on his prints, and one who paints a photograph, or tints
a gelatino-bromide with water-color. When one is capable of handling his
subject, is it not preferable for the photographer having an artistic taste to
take up his pencil, for the merest sketch will be a hundred times more inter-
esting. I do not mean to say that one cannot produce fine works with pho-
tography, but one should stick to composition, to selection, to the variety of
lightings, to his own preferences in arrangement, and I assure you, that if he
lets it go at that, then gradually the machine and the light will give him
results entirely personal. Think, compose, prepare your subject in all pos-
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