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

Contemporaneously with them lived a lady, Mrs. Julia Margaret
Cameron, who exercised a considerable influence upon those who came within
her circle, and was fortunate enough to include in this category many of the
well-known men of the time—amongst others, Herschel and Tennyson.
Mrs. Cameron realized what few could then appreciate, the difficulty of deal-
ing with the critically sharp definition of the portrait lens, and it was to meet
her requirements that instruments were made with an adjustment by which
the required degree of spherical aberration could be introduced at will. Her
portrait work is characterized by a breadth of force seen in that of no one else
since the time of Hill, and it is only by one or two modern workers, of whom
Steichen may be noted in particular, that the succession is maintained.
Mrs. Cameron died in 1879, just as the dry plate was being perfected.”
The gravure plates of the five Camerons were made by the Autotype Fine
Arts Company, London, directly from the original collodion negatives which
average about ten by twelve inches in size. The makers of the gravures are
the owners of the original negatives. The printing of the edition was done
by the Manhattan Photogravure Company, New York.
The Stieglitz Plates call for no special comment. The gravures were
made from the original 4x5 negatives by the Manhattan Photogravure Com-
pany. The “Asphalt Paver” was made in 1892; Miss S. R. in Igls, Tirol,
1904; while the two Parisian “snaps” were made in 1911.

AN OPEN LETTER
My Dear Stieglitz:
I read in the preface written for the Scandinavian Exhibition by Christian Brinton the
following paragraph:
“While it is true that we have our intermittently illuminating tabloid exhibi-
tions at the Photo-Secession, nothing is yet known of modern art as a movement, and
it is thus and thus alone, that it should be studied, not merely from isolated, unrelated
samples, or specimens which confuse, without in the least degree, clarifying the
popular mind.”
When I first read this statement I felt, I must admit, a rather unpleasant shock at the
off-hand manner in which the relentless effort during eight years of the Photo-Secession to
create an interest in and an understanding of the modern art movement was treated. But I
had not seen the Scandinavian show and I felt that it mattered little from what source the final
enlightenment of the public might come and I awaited with great interest the result of the show
which was at last to fulfil the object of “clarifying the popular mind.”
I attended the opening of the exhibition, listened to the Mayor of the City of New York,
the Scandinavian Ambassador to the United States, the Norwegian Ambassador to the United
States and the Danish Minister to the United States express their gratification at the pleasant
relations which were being established between the Scandinavian countries and the United
States of America. I then proceeded with the rest of the crowd to the exhibition rooms where
we were greeted by an impressive singing of the Norwegian National Anthem. Proceeding into
another room we heard with great delight the singing of—I believe—the Danish National
Anthem. I then had a chance to look at the paintings but I must confess my disappointment
in finding in them only a faint reflection of the continental art of twenty years ago. In fact
this exhibition did not represent the modern art movement.

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