Camera Work: A Photographic Quarterly (1911 (Heft 33))

Joseph T. Keiley so modified and developed the glycerine process as to make it peculiarly his
own. Many of his best known prints are unique, and the collector of photographic prints who
owns an example of Keiley’s early work may well feel assured that his possession is valuable as well
as an historical document as through its refined artistic merit and the scarcity of this sensitive
artist’s work.
Frank Eugene was the first of pictorial photographers to take liberties with his negatives,
using the etching needle where he felt it necessary to correct the values given by “straight develop-
ment.” He has since discontinued this practice, and his present work is as free as any of any
intrusion of a non-photographic medium. His example, however, may be responsible for the
direction in which certain workers have been developing.
The Frenchman, Robert Demachy, probably owes to Eugene’s influence* his early efforts to
make his prints look like lithographs, etchings, or works in other media, which led to his adoption
of the gum-bichromate process of which he is a master, and later to the oil process on which his
interests have been concentrated during the last few years.
In the Austrian-German school of photography, Hugo Henneberg of Vienna, Henrich Kuehn
of Innsbruck, and Hans Watzek of Vienna, known as the “Trifolium,” were undoubtedly the
leaders. The multiple-gum printing method, now used so extensively by the Austrian-German
pictorial photographer, enabled them to so control their work as to introduce the distinctly
Teutonic philosophical attitude in their unique and masterful prints. For, to quote the eminent
New York critic, Mr. Christian Brinton, “There is not a single important movement in German
painting which does not find its equivalent, and usually its inspiration, either in philosophy or
fiction. At each artist’s elbow has stood a prophet and a preacher ready to lay down the immutable
canons of composition and design.”
It is a matter of keen regret to note the breaking up of that powerful factor in the development
of pictorial photography, the “Trifolium.” Watzek met his untimely death in 1902, Henneberg,
finding the photographic art too difficult, gave it up for painting, and Kuehn has succumbed to the
influence of the American school and has adopted the methods of platinum printing and photo-
gravure, of which some interesting examples were shown side by side with some of the early
examples of himself and his associates.
In Mrs. Brigman’s work we have a good example of a literary and poetic attitude towards
art, and these notes should not be brought to a close without mentioning Craig Annan, who has
probably brought the process of photogravure to its highest technical perfection.
The Buffalo Exhibition of Photography is a tribute and a memorial to the individual achieve-
ments, which when brought together have proved beyond a doubt the right of Photography to take
its place among other media of personal expression.
Mr. F. Austin Lidbury, an aspiring photographer of Buffalo, described
the exhibition at the Albright Gallery, as he saw it, for the readers of the
December American Photography:
That one of the most important and largest Art Galleries in America should, for the space
of a month, to the complete exclusion for the time being of all minor and Preshavian forms of
art such as painting, sculpture, and etching, show a collection of six hundred pictorial photo-
graphs, is a most unequivocal and significant recognition of the place which pictorial photography
has come to hold. Yet the Albright Gallery International Exhibition of Pictorial Photography,
regarded in this light, is no spontaneous “recognition” extorted by the sheer and irresistible merits
of pictorial photography. It is primarily a monument to Alfred Stieglitz. Working with and for a
group of photographers (some of them experimentalists, some craftsmen, some artists, some of them
all three), gradually spreading their influence until he had built up under the name of the Photo-
Secession a wonderful and devoted organization with ramifications and connections extending all
over America and Europe, this Napoleon of pictorial photography has put into the movement
for internal progress and external recognition the fanaticism of a Mad Mullah, the wiles of a
Machiavelli, the advertising skill of a P. T. Barnum, the literary barbs of a Whistler, and an
*It is only in his later work that M. Demachy occasionally shows the influence of Frank Eugene. His earlier
prints were made without any knowledge of the work of Eugene. I owe it to both gentlemen to correct the unintentional
inadvertency of my article as originally printed.—P. B. H.
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