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

THE PHENIX IN THE EMBERS

I ONCE owned one of the small Japanese carvings called Netsukes in
the making of which some humble eighteenth century artist of old
Nippon had spent his loving labor and in the rude beauty of which he
had bodied forth the vision of his soul’s desire and the imagined beatitude of
its attainment. It was a small figure whose height may have been two inches.
Its anatomy was more symbolic than exact. Its workmanship was of an
inspired crudeness. It had, let us say, been carved from a stray bit of ebony
by an untutored genius with a knife and fork. A dwarfish and uncouth gnome
held clasped to his black breast a branchlet of blood-red coral; and in the
absorption of his pose, in the strained strength of his bulbous arms and in the
rapture of his uplifted and oblivious gaze one glimpsed the ultimate joy of
undreamed-of dreams come true.
Metaphorically speaking, and with such abatement of the spontaneous
elation of discovery as custom demands of the sober critic, it is in some such
mental attitude that I appear before the readers of Camera Work; holding
in my arms a new-found volume by an unknown writer.
And it is not without reason that I appear, thus laden, before this company.
Camera Work is the mouthpiece of a movement which, inaugurated for
a specific purpose and long known by a specific if somewhat cryptic name, has
come by a process of growth and elision to be known as The Secession. This
movement was inaugurated with the sole aim of vindicating the claims of
photography to citizenship in the republic of art. It has long since made
good this endeavor. And it is not without significance that it now finds itself,
among other activities, maintaining an island of refuge for art amid the traffic
of an essentially photographic philistinism. It started as a forlorn hope. It
finds itself one division of a desperate, but not a despicable, army. For The
Secession, although independent in its inception and individual in its develop-
ment, although locally isolated and at odds with its immediate environment,
neither stands alone today nor is out of touch with its times. There are other
secessions. And there are hosts of secessionists, some of them all but uncon-
scious of their enlistment. Pictorial art is but one of the least of their fields
of battle. On the heights of religion, on the uplands of science, on the slopes
of literature, on the level arable plains of life their fluttering standard has
been, or is being, raised. They speak in diverse tongues. They wear unlike
insignia. They follow unrelated leaders or fight leaderless. But they are
unwittingly enrolled under one banner.
To whom then, if not to the readers of Camera Work, should one first
announce the appearance of an evangelist of Secession, or offer the first book
of its gospel ?
The name of the evangelist is Allen Upward. The superscription of the
gospel is The New Word. And the word from the interpretation of which the
gospel has grown is idealist.
The history of the book is a curious one. It was first published some
time since in a cheaply printed and anonymous edition in Geneva. It was

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