Camera Work: A Photographic Quarterly (1913 (Heft 42-43))

PHOTOGRAPHY AND ARTISTIC-PHOTOGRAPHY

PHOTOGRAPHY is not Art, but photographs can be made to be Art.
When man uses the camera without any preconceived idea of final
results, when he uses the camera as a means to penetrate the objective
reality of facts, to acquire a truth,which he tries to represent by itself and not
by adapting it to any system of emotional representation, then, man is doing
Photography.
Photography, pure photography, is not a new system for the representation
of Form, but rather the negation of all representative systems, it is the means
by which the man of instinct, reason and experience approaches nature in
order to attain the evidence of reality.
Photography is the experimental science of Form. Its aim is to find and
determine the objectivity of Form; that is, to obtain the condition of the
initial phenomenon of Form, phenomenon which under the dominion of the
mind of man creates emotions, sensations and ideas.
The difference between Photography and Artistic-Photography is that,
in the former, man tries to get at that objectivity of Form which generates
the different conceptions that man has of Form, while the second uses the
objectivity of Form to express a preconceived idea in order to convey an
emotion. The first is the fixing of an actual state of Form, the other is the
representation of the objectivity of Form, subordinated to a system of repre-
sentation. The first is a process of indigitation, the second a means of expres-
sion. In the first, man tries to represent something that is outside of himself;
in the second he tries to represent something that is in himself. The first is a
free and impersonal research, the second is a systematic and personal repre-
sentation.
The artist photographer uses nature to express his individuality, the
photographer puts himself in front of nature, and without preconceptions,
with the free mind of an investigator, with the method of an experimentalist,
tries to get out of her a true state of conditions.
The artist photographer in his work envelops objectivity with an idea,
veils the object with the subject. The photographer expresses, so far as he
is able to, pure objectivity. The aim of the first is pleasure; the aim of the
second, knowledge. The one does not destroy the other.
Subjectivity is a natural characteristic of man. Representation began
by the simple expression of the subject. In the development of the evolution
of representation, man has been slowly approaching the object. The History
of Art proves this statement.
In subjectivity man has exhausted the representation of all the emotions
that are peculiar to humanity. When man began to be inductive instead of
deductive in his represented expressions, objectivity began to take the place
of subjectivity. The more analytical man is, the more he separates himself
from the subject and the nearer he gets to the comprehension of the object.

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