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

sible ways, use feeling, then open the objective and put your hands in your
pockets, or else have someone put handcuffs on you.”
WILLETTE
A humorist, full of go, a painter of Pierrot, his favorite hero, and of any
infinity of graceful and imaginative drawings, of daring nudes, Willette is a
decorator, original, full of individual qualities, of impulsive freshness and
spontaneity.
“ The question is very simple. Be it pure photography or otherwise,
if the print produces a satisfactory feeling of pleasure, the result is art, and
the photographer an artist. I believe that it is necessary to intervene on the
proof, by any process, every time that the print from the negative does not
give us what we want; then it will no longer be the detestable retouching of
a professional whose aim is to give to the flesh the texture of the “baudruche,”
but an interesting transformation which can be varied in every print made.
But once more I must repeat that the result will not be a success unless it is
obtained by a true artist, and not by the first-comer, who gets only the hor-
rible effects which were gotten by the primitive, banal photographer. How-
ever, one must intervene in such a manner that there must not be too brutal
differences in the modelling between the photographic drawing and the sim-
plified drawing.
RAFFAELLI
A contemporary of the first impressionists, Raffaelli called into being,
in painting of a kind until then unknown, all the strange life, the miserable
aspects, and sad atmosphere of the Parisian outskirts, and the poor at their
work in all their every-day attitudes, in their familiar surroundings—new
visions of modern Paris. He is also a portraitist (as in “ Clemenceau au
Cirque Fernando”), a sculptor, a lecturer, a writer and critic of infinitely
sensitive temperament.
“ Photography so conceived may, to my mind, have qualities of art.
The works before me are in all cases personal because one sees the expres-
sion of an idea, of a sentiment—that there has been reflection, thought, intelli-
gence, and because the photographer has intervened in the composition, in
the choice and in the synthesis of the light. The author may interpret his
subject by the modern processes, gum-bichromate, oil, etc., provided that the
transformation be effected by a true artist and that the work lose none of its
unity by an exaggerated or only partial intervention. I am much interested
in the experiments that have been made; I remember, however, having
already seen, some years ago at the Otto studio, a number of photographs
by Mr. Steichen that impressed me as very convincing.”
CAMILLE MAUCLAIR
One of the best endowed of the generation called symbolists. A poet,
like his colleagues, Maeterlinck, Gustave Kahn, H. de Regnier, a prolific

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