Camera Work: A Photographic Quarterly (1910 (Heft 29))

tation. It is especially dangerous if the privileged critic descends from his
Hill of Disport and, with a quick assumption of the Apostolic attitude, mixes
with his “brethren” as one of them; for this may be but a piece of clever
oratorical “business” to cinch an argument with fine condescension.
When Mr. Shaw tells us that there is a terrible truthfulness about photog-
raphy; when he speaks of a painter “inventing” his pictures, and of a photog-
rapher as “deliberately falsifying” in “faking” his plate, I take the liberty
to assume an attitude opposed to Mr. Bernard Shaw. I am so directly opposed
that, finding myself unable to understand what Mr. Shaw means, I am com-
pelled to ask him questions. His words seem to me to possess no contents—
they appear as symbols of speech emptied of their meaning by colloquial
habit.
I ask, then, wherein lies this terrible truthfulness in photography ? Is it
in the lens ? If it is, then the lens must be in living relation with the object.
But, surely, the lens is not living. And if it is not living it cannot possess or
know either truth or its opposite. Is it in the sensitized plate ? But the plate
is like the lens, neither truthful nor lying. If, then, this terrible truthfulness
in photography be neither in the lens nor in the plate, where is it ? Perhaps
Mr. Shaw meant to say the truth of the object was in the object ? How does
he know it ? Did the object privately whisper it to Mr. Shaw when he directed
his camera at it so that the truth should appear on the plate ? Perhaps that
accounts for its terribleness ?
When Mr. Shaw saw himself in the looking-glass, as he tells us in this
lecture he once did see himself, and saw a disagreeable looking man, did the
looking-glass tell him the truth, or was it Mr. Shaw who was telling himself
the truth ? I am prone to think the looking-glass was indifferent. What does a
looking-glass know of agreeable or disagreeable ? Or, for the matter of that,
what does it know of Mr. Shaw ? What does a camera know of beauty or
ugliness ? Or, in any sense of knowing, what does a camera know of anything
at all ? And if there be no krfowledge, how can there be truth ?
As I ask myself these questions I begin to get a faint idea of what Mr.
Shaw meant to say but didn’t say. Yet, though I would not be so presumptu-
ous as to find the right words for his meaning, I will endeavor to answer his
meaning, leaving the implication to justify my intuitive reading of Mr. Shaw’s
mind. Does a gun know the target ? Is it not the man behind the gun who
does the knowing—who is in living relation with the target—who is in any
possible sense in possession of the truth ? If it is the man behind the gun who
is in living relation with the target, has he not the right, nay, is it not his duty,
so to direct the gun that the bullet shall hit the target ? If it is the man behind
the camera who is in living relation with the object, has he not the right, nay,
is it not his duty, so to deal with the plate that it shall express that living
relation ?
But Mr. Shaw calls this “faking” and “deliberately falsifying.” Falsi-
fying what ? Surely not what the lens focussed on the plate; since what the
lens focussed the photographer’s retina did not and could not see. What the
photographer did see he tries, by “faking,” if you like to call it so, to produce

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