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

“Transform under the condition that your print remains (without an
evident mixture of drawing) a photograph, and that the final result does not
remind you of anything else.” And these appreciations are not, as one might
be led to believe, a total condemnation of all the experiments made by a group
of artist searchers with a view to establishing photography as a new medium of
expression, of liberating its possibilities for art, in spite of its limitations.
Notwithstanding the efforts towards improvement which are sometimes car-
ried to extremes, there are a great many prints done in “gum” and “oil”
which contain to perfection the beautiful modelling which can be achieved
solely by the action of light on the gelatine, the qualities of soft modulations,
of the half-tones, qualities above all photographic and carefully preserved by
the artists. Their authors have possibly gone to the extreme in some of
their researches, while others at the other extreme have failed to achieve a
photographic style. If, through disgust at the servility of the camera,
through excess of desire to liberate, they have gone beyond their proper range,
to a virtuosity objectionable to some, one must remember that several artists,
especially Rodin, do not hesitate to declare that there are in the attempts of
today but the hesitating preliminaries of an art from which one may expect
anything, because it is still in its infancy.
Soon, perhaps, new processes, certain discoveries, will allow those who
are not satisfied with the first attempts, to realize their thoughts more exactly,
in a manner less crude than today, less suggestive of foreign means, more
intense, more allied to the “ spirit of the process.”
George Besson.

THE CAMERA POINT OF VIEW
IN PAINTING AND PHOTOGRAPHY
A FEW months ago three exhibitions were held in New York
simultaneously; of oil-paintings at Eugene Glaenzer’s gal-
lery, and of photographs and autochrome color-plates in
the rooms of the Photo-Secession. They were all the
work of one man, Eduard J. Steichen. However, it is not so much of his
personality that I am for the present thinking, as of the fact of his operating
in three mediums; in painting and photography with fairly equal facility;
and in the newly invented color-plates, with an originality and comparative
success that are full of promise regarding the ultimate possibilities of this
medium. The exhibitions, indeed, brought to a head what had long been
brewing in my mind: the analogy between painting and photography in
respect to the point of view and technical motives.*
A great many painters still refuse to photography the recognition of
being a medium of artistic expression; just as, I am told, there are certain
conservatives among the mountaineers of Georgia who believe that the Civil

*Since writing this, I find that Steichen himself has essayed the same subject.

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