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

or needle; something also of the chemical properties of the particular medium
that he uses; and has been content to wait till he has mastered the essentials
before indulging in the idiosyncrasies of personal expression. Why, then,
should he not smile at the photographer who tries to be an artist before he has
learned to be a craftsman ?
The painter, however, judges this lack of craftsmanship by reference to
the points, particularly those of composition, that photography shares with his
own art. But the student of pictorial photography may easily find a graver
charge of inadequacy, based upon a failure in respect to the qualities of photog-
raphy that are fundamentally photographic. Need I repeat that these are
the product of the essentially scientific nature of the process, and of the precision
of the photographic record ? It is an arbitrary interference with the latter and
an ignorance of the former, which are responsible for so much that is tediously
commonplace in ordinary commercial photography and so solemnly inefficient
in the work of the ambitious “ pictorialist. ” It was this that the Dresden
Exposition so impressively emphasized.
Here was conclusively displayed the enormous importance of photography.
Its immense field of usefulness, as shown here, was sufficient to stir the most
lethargic imagination. It has penetrated into regions of study and practice
with which the average man had not hitherto associated it. After seeing this
exposition he may not be far wrong in concluding that, with the possible excep-
tion of that of steam, no discovery has so affected the surface and depths of
modern civilization. And the nucleus of its influence is that in an age, newly
and more profoundly awakened to the scientific aspects of existence, photog-
raphy is itself a scientific process, lending itself at every turn to the acquisition
and dissemination of knowledge. That it is scientific is at once the significance
and the measure of its value. And none the less in that department w'hich
impinges on the picture-making. In an age when even painting is borrowing
from science, it is no mere co-incidence that graphic art has been enriched by
a scientific process. It is this belief in photography as the evolution of a new
service to art as well as to science, that should be the pride of the pictorial
photographer and must be his principle and practice, if he is to develop his
art to its legitimate possibility. On the other hand to whittle down the value of
the individual record to the dead sameness of conventional trickery or to sub-
stitute for the certainties of science the flip-flops of personal expression, is to
be false to the best of what photography is capable. One had known this
before, but became more than ever impressed with it after seeing the Dresden
Exposition. Indeed, a general impression of the latter suggested that the
honors of the show rested chiefly with the departments which illustrated the
scientific application of photography, that the pictorial sections were by com-
parison uninspiring, and for the reasons at which I have already hinted.
For the purposes of classification they were divided into groups of pro-
fessional photography and of amateur photography, with a third sandwiched
in between. This was the International Group of Art Photographers,
which comprised most of the Secessionists and some others; all of them pro-

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