Camera Work: A Photographic Quarterly (1910 (Heft 30))

humanity, no matter whether a poet, reformer, philosopher or artist, always
hooted by the crowd, and pelted with mud, even by his friends!
It can not be otherwise. What can we expect of a public that admires
Vibert and is ashamed of hanging a nude. The public has no time to reflect.
It is only concerned with the effect. Its esthetic appreciation lives on memo-
ries or reminiscences. It admires only what it has seen before. It is always
opposed to real originality. The road of novel ideas is too rough for them.
They prefer to leap through the paper loops of the modish art dealer and critic.
Discrimination is not granted to the Philistines. Paint, like verse and music,
is something which the technically ignorant can not understand. Technically
they know art as little as the artists know stocks and wireless telegraphy. At
the best they want forgetfulness from the banality of life. Few dare to feel
for themselves—all that the laymen require is their enjoyment of art. They
do not dare to go into the large open places of life, shaken by the winds of
space. They envy the artists because they possess powers and liberties that
they do not possess. They will always filch the destiny and thoughts of great
men.
This may be perhaps the reason why so many men of genius, at all times,
were considered madmen by their contemporaries. The true contemporaries
of such men are not those among whom they live, but the few elect of all ages.
The world which they comprehend with their abnormal faculties is not the
world in which they really live, theirs has entirely different proportions and
limitations.

ON THE POSSIBILITY OF NEW LAWS
OF COMPOSITION

THE wealth of reproductive processes has enlarged our visual apprecia-
tion of form and general aspect of things to a marvelous degree.
Photography, no doubt, has furnished the strongest impetus. It
is the most rapid interpreter known to pictorial expression, and has given the
person of undeveloped mind, of little skill and few ideas, an opportunity to
become a picture maker. The results of photography permeate all intellec-
tual phases of our life. Through the illustrations of newspapers, books, maga-
zines, business circulars, advertisements, objects that previous to Daguerre’s
invention were not represented pictorially have become common property.
Former ages offered no opportunities to the common people to acquire
this facility of discerning accurate representations of life on a flat surface in
black and white. The draftsmen and stone cutters of primitive times, realizing
that their delineation was a simple form of picture writing, had no thought of
any more forceful delineation than that which sufficed people to clearly under-
stand the meaning of figures and symbols. They had no conception of what
modern artists call effect, the pictorial study of appearances, which even the
most ordinary newspaper illustration can claim. On one hand we see figures
in pure accurate outlines, facts of easily legible forms; on the other hand

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