Camera Work: A Photographic Quarterly (1914 (Heft 47))

291—ITS MEANING TO ME

The reality of anything is its spirit. The spirit of “291” came to me
some time before it had any material body. It was in “Camera Notes” for
October, 1901, that I found it. Strange as the statement may sound to city
dwellers, it is true that was the first number of “Camera Notes” I ever saw,
and at that time the term “Pictorial Photography” meant nothing to me.
But in that magazine the pictures “September” and “An Icy Night,” by
Stieglitz, and Mrs. Kasebier’s “Fruits of the Earth” were a revelation to me
as to what might be accomplished in photography, and great was my joy in
them. I subscribed at once for “Camera Notes,” and still have the four
numbers that came to me, ending with volume six, number one. Then in
January 1903 came the first number of Camera Work, and “The Manger,”
by Mrs. Kasebier, was the first of a long line of pictures from that well-loved
publication to be placed above my desk for many days. So the “spirit” led
me on, an interested and willing follower, to its final embodiment in “291.”
Very wonderful and very real is the human soul. Living, it always is
active, and is compelled to express itself. This expression we call Art, in
its broad sense. It may be motion, or color, or form, or words, or sounds,—
it may even be machinery or engineering: so far as it is an expression of soul
power, it is art. So, when men, speaking only of one form of soul-expression,
cry “Art is dead!” remember that Art cannot die so long as the human soul
lives. Browning and Tennyson have lived and have written since some men
wailed “Poetry is dead!” and now we have Alfred Noyes and others even in
this so-called materialistic age. But Art does not die—cannot die—in any
form of expression. True, the expression changes; at times it departs from
the “rules of Art” and pursues paths strange and devious before it rests again,
for a little space, in some newly accepted form: but this change is not an
evidence of death, but of life. And just because the soul is a living thing
and must express itself in many ways, it grows weary of one style of expression,
no matter how beautiful that may be, and begins in some simple,—possibly
some savage way,—to evolve other styles, other forms.
Gothic was at one time the supreme form of expression in architecture.
How men loved it! They called upon all nature to furnish forms and ideals
for them. Trees and flowers, beasts and birds, fishes, waves of the sea and
flames of fire,—all living, moving things must be wrought in stone that it too,
might become a living thing,—a vital expression of the human soul. And
Gothic developed, and ever its forms grew complex and more elaborate, more
labored, until the waving, leaping, twisting, shimmering lines of the “flam-
boyant” were the sign that the end had been reached. Then came the re-
action. The world saw buildings arising like the cathedral of Orleans, and
in place of lofty portals crowded with statues of saints and angels and wreathed
with flowers, there were but simple openings apparently cut out of a plain
wall. Instead of spires springing from the earth like fountains of flowers,
there were drums surrounded by columns and placed one upon another.
Instead of flame-like window tracery ribbed and flower-leaved, men saw the

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