Camera Work: A Photographic Quarterly (1909 (Heft 25))

PERSONALITY IN PHOTOGRAPHY—
WITH A WORD ON COLOR
HE unwise, those who refuse to learn from the study of exhibited
work, and who are unable to learn by practical experience, say
that though photography may have its art aspects and value, yet
it can never hope to attain to a very high place, as its sense of
personality, its obedience to individuality, is so limited. Give half a dozen
men the same camera, lenses and plates, and send them to the same place to
do the same thing, and all the results will be alike, or so nearly alike as to
reveal the real mechanicalness of photography. Yet, curiously enough,
this is just one of the most difficult things a photographer can be set to do,
to exactly repeat himself, or another. He may use the identical apparatus,
know the subject perfectly, and yet be totally unable to bring away an exact
replica.
Years ago I had the honor of having some architectural studies repro-
duced in this magazine, and to one of them I gave the title “Height and
Light in Bourges Cathedral.” Since then I have been able to repeat the
subject in a larger size (4 x 5), but it came with a totally different effect of
lighting; and this year I was able to repeat it once more, still larger, in
8 x 10 size; and as I was fully content with the light effect in my 4 x 5, I
tried hard to get that rendering again. But the increase in size of apparatus
and focus of lens made the position of camera so different as to prevent an
exact repeating of the composition, the narrowness of the aisle was such as
to compel the camera’s distance from the subject to give a different com-
position.
The light also proved baffling; the two previous efforts had been made,
as was this, in full summer, with a continuous blaze of sun; but the direction
of the sun’s rays from the different month, or week, or day, made a repetition
of the previous light effect quite impossible, though it was studied and watched
for at all hours. One version is not inferior to another, but it was interesting
to find how impossible it was to repeat the former effect even by the same
worker.
Critics, of the vague sort referred to, also deny the sense of creation to
photography, limiting it, even at its best, to the achieving of a mere record.
But set two men to record, say, a Rodin sculpture, or a cathedral grotesque;
the mechanically minded man will only see and produce a lifeless result, a
mere empty record; the artist, the trained observer, will study his subject till
he sees the one point of view at which the vital essence of the sculpture is
revealed in its fullest degree; one will be a dull, dead, uninteresting copy, the
other as welcome and stimulating in its way as the original is in its, with its
fullest characteristic or vitality made manifest.
That the recording factor is an instrument, a machine, if you will, no
more compels mechanicalness than a piano makes a Beethoven sonata mech-
anical because it is only audible through its agency; it is neither the piano or
the camera that really matters, it is what is done by them.


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