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

Still no sound—no one—just the sunny gloom of the little place.
And those pictures! I couldn't believe my eyes—what did they mean?
It was as though I had come from or gone to another planet.
In the midst of this whirlwind of thoughts there came the sound of a
voice, staccato, masculine.
I peered out. No one was in the hall. Beyond was another little room,
amber lighted. In it was a carven chest and a great carven bookcase, a deli-
cate black and gold table on which stood a large gum-print of Duse—and
there were tapestries and Venetian glass vases. Though so silent, the whole
place was full of an atmosphere.
Again the staccato voice the other side of the tapestry that hung across
a doorway.
It sounded impatient, yet the overtone was right.
Past the tapestry was a long mirror with sconces at either end; in it a
face—my own. It was most uncanny. The eyes looked like the saucer-like
mother-of-pearl discs and black seed iris of an old samoan idol of childhood
memory.
Then this room took shape with its tapestries and wall papers—a great
table, a huge horsehair lounge, a girl's head against the light of a window,
the click of a typewriter, and standing at a table, a slight figure in black
who was forcing a recreant print or page into place with paste and the palm
of his hand.
“Good morning," I said, “I have come!"
“That’s good," said the figure with a glance over the rim of his glasses,
still holding down the print, “make yourself at home."
Silence.
It was what Maeterlinck calls an “active silence." I didn’t know it
was that kind, at the time.
Don’t you remember trying, in your youth, to sit still on a haircloth
sofa during long Sunday morning prayers? Of the ache in your legs for
flight; of the hunger for air in your nostrils; of the wild, wonderful need to
stampede?
Never mind. All this belongs to the impressions that gather themselves
around those first spaces called a few minutes which were the beginnings of
the real “291."
For eight months I had the privilege of really being at home there.
There the deeps within deeps of people, pictures, conditions and myself
were revealed.
I grew to understand why the Fellows of the Photo-Secession might not
use the sign of the Golden Sun as a commercial ear tag, when it stood for
an ideal.
Why and how Camera Work is an heroic labor of love, and a monument
to the beauty, through Photography, not the glorification of the individual,
of the impatient pastime of the Man behind It.
Of the Friend of the Man who put up, out of his own pocket, money for
a three, years’ lease that the Little Gallery might keep its home.
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