Camera Work: A Photographic Quarterly (1912 (Heft 37))

BERNARD SHAW ON PHOTOGRAPHY
[In the volume recently published on “George Bernard Shaw, His Life
and Works” by Archibald Henderson, a summing up of what Shaw has had
to say on photography is included.
As Camera Work can be considered, partially at least, a summing up
of the evolution and history of pictorial photography, we reprint for the
sake of record those pages of Mr. Henderson’s book relating to photography.
We would call attention to Nos. XIV and XV of Camera Work in which the
full text of some of the original Shaw articles can be found.—The Editors.]
“But his most signal art criticism of the last decade, beyond question,
has had to do with photography. In 1901, he announced that ‘the conquest
by photography of the whole field of monochromatic representative art may be
regarded as completed by the work of this year.’ His position is based on
the dictum that, in photography, the drawing counts for nothing, the thought
and judgment count for everything; whereas in the etching and daubing
processes where great manual skill is needed to produce anything that the
eye can endure, the execution counts for more than the thought. This is
no new or sudden notion, derived from the study of some photographic
exhibition, but the mature statement of a judgment arrived at over a quarter
of a century ago. In An Unsocial Socialist, Trefusis astounds Erskine and
Sir Charles Brandon with those same remarkable views on photography
which to-day, in the mouth of Bernard Shaw, so delight the patrons of the
Photographic Salon.*
“It is more than twenty years since I first said in print that nine-tenths
(or ninety-nine hundredths, I forget which) of what was then done by brush
and pencil would presently be done, and far better done, by the camera.
But it needed some imagination, as well as some hardihood, to say this at
that time . . . because the photographers of that day were not artists.
. . . Let us admit handsomely that some of the elder men had the root of
the matter in them as the younger men of to-day; but the process did not
then attract artists. . . . On the whole, the process was not quite ready
for the ordinary artist, because (1) it could not touch color or even give
colors their proper light values; (2) the Impressionist movement had not
then rediscovered and popularized the great range of art that lies outside
color; (3) the eyes of artists had been so long educated to accept the most
grossly fictitious conventions as truths of representation that many of the
truths of the focussing screen were at first repudiated as grotesque falsehoods;
(4) the wide-angled lens did in efFect lie almost as outrageously as a Royal
Academician, whilst the anastigmat was revoltingly prosaic, and the silver
print, though so exquisite that the best will, if they last, be one day prized
by collectors, was cloying, and only suitable to a narrow range of subjects;
(5) above all, the vestries would cheerfully pay fifty pounds for a villainous
oil-painting of a hospitable chairman, whilst they considered a guinea a first-

* Compare Photography, October 26th, 1909.

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