Camera Work: A Photographic Quarterly (1911 (Heft 36))

THE RELATION OF TIME TO ART
AFTER living constantly for two years in the quiet and seclusion of a
London suburb, and then suddenly being plunged into the rush and
^ turmoil of New York, where time and space are of more value than
in any other part of our world, this consideration of the relation of time to
art has been forced upon me.
As photography has, up to the present time, been my sole means of
expression, I can best understand and attempt to explain my meaning by
consideration of the part time plays in the art of the camera.
Photography is the most modern of the arts, its development and prac-
tical usefulness extends back only into the memory of living men; in fact,
it is more suited to the art requirements of this age of scientific achievement
than any other. It is, however, only by comparing it with the older art of
painting that we will get the full value of our argument plainly before us;
and in doing so we shall find that the essential difference is not so much a
mechanical one of brushes and pigments as compared with a lens and dry
plates, but rather a mental one of a slow, gradual, usual building up, as com-
pared with an instantaneous, concentrated mental impulse, followed by a
longer period of fruition. Photography born of this age of steel seems to
have naturally adapted itself to the necessarily unusual requirements of an
art that must live in skyscrapers, and it is because she has become so much
at home in these gigantic structures that the Americans undoubtedly are the
recognized leaders in the world movement of pictorial photography.
Just imagine any one trying to paint at the corner of Thirty-fourth street,
where Broadway and Sixth avenue cross! The camera has recorded an
impression in the flashing fragment of a second. But what about the training,
you will say, that has made this seizing of the momentary vision possible ?
It is, let me tell you, no easy thing to acquire, and necessitates years of practice
and something of the instinctive quality that makes a good marksman. Just
think of the combination of knowledge and sureness of vision that was required
to make possible Stieglitz’s ‘ ‘Winter on Fifth Avenue/’ If you call it a “glori-
fied snapshot” you must remember that life has much of this same quality.
We are comets across the sky of eternity.
It has been said of me, to come to the personal aspect of this problem,
that I work too quickly, and that I attempt to photograph all New York in a
week. Now to me New York is a vision that rises out of the sea as I come
up the harbor on my Atlantic liner, and which glimmers for a while in the
sun for the first of my stay amidst its pinnacles; but which vanishes, but for
fragmentary glimpses, as I become one of the grey creatures that crawl about
like ants, at the bottom of its gloomy caverns. My apparently unseemly
hurry has for its object my burning desire to record, translate, create, if you
like, these visions of mine before they fade. I can do only the creative part
of photography, the making of the negative, with the fire of enthusiasm burn-
ing at the white heat; but the final stage, the print, requires quiet contem-
plation, time, in fact, for its fullest expression. That is why my best work
is from American negatives printed in England.

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