Camera Work: A Photographic Quarterly (1909 (Heft 28))

SOME IMPRESSIONS FROM THE INTERNATIONAL
PHOTOGRAPHIC EXPOSITION, DRESDEN

AT Dresden, this year, painting and sculpture made way for
photography. The permanent exposition buildings at the
Austellungs-Park had been adapted to the requirements of a
photographic exposition, which for completeness and consequent
interest excelled anything of the kind ever attempted. For it
represented in panoramic review not only the developments
which the craft itself has attained, but also the uses to which it is
being applied in other than pictorial directions. It was indeed the first
thoroughly organized effort to show with some measure of detail the ex-
tent to which photography has ramified in modern civilization; how, apart
from its familiar service in the way of pictorial representation, it has grown
to be the resourceful and continually more trusted handmaid of science, edu-
cation, and sociological reform. So enlightening was its evidence of the
far-reaching possibilities of photography that the example set by Dresden
will necessarily be followed in other progressive communities; and already, I
was told in (Buda-Pesth,) a similar exposition is being organized in that city.
For the readers of Camera Work no direct reference need be made to
the departments in which the utility of photography for purposes of research
and record was so variously and amply demonstrated. Yet indirectly this
accumulated evidence was full of suggestion even for those who are identified
with the art solely as a means of pictorial expression. It served to emphasize,
for example, two points that from their very unquestionableness are apt to be
overlooked: the intrinsic value of photography as a means of record and the
fact that such value is due to its scientific properties.
These, of course, are the precise points that have commended it and made
it so invaluable to the scientific student. Per contra they are the very points
of which many who use photography for the purpose of picture-making seem
to be distrustful. Instead of jealously preserving the integrity of the photo-
graphic record, they adopt endless devices to elude it; in place of relying upon
the scientific precision of their medium, they resort to the slipshod of accident
and to the trickiness of personal interference. In their eagerness to be artists
they disregard in their art what the scientists most highly prize. They tumble,
in fact, into the pit which the painters, jealous of photography, have dug for
their discomfiture. “We admit,” say the painters, “that photography is of
great value to the scientist and to all others desiring an accurate record of visible
facts; but we deny its claim to be considered a medium of artistic expression,
because you cannot control it from start to finish.” So to prove the fallacy
of this the photographers—not all perhaps, but certainly too many,—adopt
another fallacy. They prostitute the scientific integrity of their art to the
specious pretext of personal expression. They begin where they ought to
leave off; and the painter looks on and smiles. For he has begun by learning
the rudiments of his own art; what, in fact, can be done with charcoal, brush

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