Camera Work: A Photographic Quarterly (1909 (Heft 26))

INTERNATIONAL PHOTOGRAPHY AT THE NATIONAL
ARTS CLUB, NEW YORK

THE International Exhibition of Pictorial Photography held at the National Arts
Club, from February second to twentieth, furnished an interesting and instructive
demonstration of the possibilities of photography as a medium of personal
expression. In its diversity of subject as well as treatment and in the high quality
of its individual exhibits this show was far the best ever held in this country.
It did much to open the eyes of many, both laymen and artists in general, to the
intrinsic merits of photography which, however, not a few insisted on giving
the left-handed compliment of comparison with painting. This was done not only in the case of
the big Germans: Henneberg, Kuhn, Watzek, and the Hofmeisters, whose prints by reason of
their size courted this comparison, but also in the case of Clarence H. White, whose 8xio prints
together with the group contributed by Alfred Stieglitz, furnished one of the most delightful
examples of straightforward photography and, let me add, of the imaginative, sensitive use of
the camera, alert to the inner beauty as well as the outward glory of life.
And here we are at once at the very heart of all the misunderstanding, both wilful and merely
ignorant, that has been an obstacle to the acceptance of the fair claims of photography. The
public, the writers on art,and the painters have all been and still are worshippers of the fetich:
that whatever is made by hand must necessarily be art, forgetting the while that the few authentic
things in art are the product of the same fine intelligence and delicate perception that may choose
the camera as its medium of communicating to the world what it sees and feels; that it is a matter
of brains, not brushes, and that where the artist is there art will be.
This insistence upon brush marks as technique, and technique as art, has been the great
stumbling-block to people seeing and enjoying for themselves what is inherently beautiful without
regard to what is right and what is wrong, until many, wholly befuddled and discomfited by all
this cant and humbug about what is art, take refuge in that back alley of individual discernment:
“I don’t know anything about art, but I know what I like,” which is perhaps just as wise as the
people who know all about what is art, but don’t know what they like when they see it. For both
of these, and they constitute the larger part of the much-talked-of “Art-loving Public,” pictorial
photography is more or less a delusion and a snare. It is too new, too recent, too much a real part
of the logical development of contemporary life and comes a bit too proudly and unconventionally
to be understood and accepted of its own time. And some of the ablest and strongest photographers
have themselves felt this and been influenced thereby to meet the painters more or less on their
own grounds, both as to the size and the general treatment of their subjects, proving quite con-
clusively that what the painter could do with the palette and brush they could do equally well
with the camera.
This was true very largely of that fine group of German prints, to which I have already re-
ferred, and of Steichen’s splendid series of seven prints, which surprised all who came to praise
painting at the expense of photography. Many could not and would not believe that they were
not reproductions of paintings or else prints that had been painted upon with a brush. When told
that they were neither one nor the other they simply scoffed and hooted and replied that they knew
better.
While this may serve the purpose of obtaining for photography a certain recognition, I do not
believe it is the best kind of recognition in the end, for it seems to me to defeat the real spirit of
photography which is not to simulate this or that established or accepted medium, but to be wholly
and uncompromisingly itself, expressing in a new way somewhat of the ancient beauty of life.
That it does this few who saw the exhibition at the National Arts Club will deny; that it does it
as well as painting, not a few will admit, and that it will in time make poor painting and especially
painting of the obvious, surface facts of life superfluous a few are already willing to acknowledge.
But this is not the whole thing, nor yet the most important.
This exhibition demonstrated for the first time in a comprehensive manner that pictorial
photography is the one and only new contribution made to the art of the world by America, and
furthermore that it is the only other art movement of modern times that can be compared in sig-