Camera Work: A Photographic Quarterly (1913 (Heft 41))

by the great philosophers, like Plato, Aristotle and Kant; and the great
naturalists, like Linnaeus, Cuvier and Geoffray Saint Hilaire.
Art presents to us what we may call the emotional or intellectual truth;
photography the material truth.
Art has taught us to feel emotions in the presence of a work that repre-
sents the emotions experienced by the artist. Photography teaches us to
realize and feel our own emotions.
I have never accepted Art as infinite nor the human brain as omnipotent.
I believe in progress as a constant and ineludible law, and I am sure we are
advancing, though we are ignorant how, why and whither; nor know how
far we shall go.
I believe that the influence of Art has developed the imagination of man,
carrying it to its highest degree of intensity and sensibility, leading him to
conceive the incomprehensible and the irrepresentable. No sooner had the
imagination carried man to chaos, than he groped for a new path which would
take him to that “ whither, ” impossible to conceive, and he found photography.
He found in it a powerful element of orientation for the realization of that
perfect consciousness for which science has done and is doing so much, to en-
able man to understand reason, the cause of facts—Truth.
Photography represents Form as it is required by the actual state of the
progress of human intelligence. In this epoch of fact, photography is the
concrete representation of consummated facts. In this epoch of the indica-
tion of truth through materialism, photography comes to supply the material
truth of Form.
This is its true mission in the evolution of human progress. It is not to
be the means of expression for the intellect of man.
Marius De Zayas.

AN APPEAL FROM ONE TO ANOTHER
If by diligence, inspiration, or both, I should be so fortunate as to sense
or glimpse some fragment of Truth and Beauty, which, either because I am
lonely or altruistic (what matter which?), I desire and strive to share, (no
matter through what medium) — some fresh significance or joy in a contrast,
a rhythm, an abstraction, a harmony, a phase, or “what not,” of life, color,
form, movement or sound — help me to do so. Come with me in a kindly
spirit, lend me your senses in a friendly attitude, come with an open mind.
“There is nothing new under the sun,” except your way, and my way of
looking at it all. We have everything to gain, and nothing to lose by the
sharing, and who knows, to what heights the stepping-stone of mutual com-
prehension of this or that may lead us? Rex Stovel