Camera Work: A Photographic Quarterly (1917 (Heft 49-50))

actually happened: namely, that America has really been expressed in
terms of America without the outside influence of Paris art-schools
or their dilute offspring here. This development extends over the
comparatively short period of sixty years, and there was no real move-
ment until the years between 1895 and 1910, at which time an intense
rebirth of enthusiasm and energy manifested itself all over the world.
Moreover, this renaissance found its highest aesthetic achievement in
America, where a small group of men and women worked with honest
and sincere purpose, some instinctively and few consciously, but with-
out any background of photographic or graphic formulae much less
any cut and dried ideas of what is Art and what isn’t; this innocence
was their real strength. Everything they wanted to say, had to be
worked out by their own experiments: it was born of actual living.
In the same way the creators of our skyscrapers had to face the similar
circumstance of no precedent, and it was through that very necessity
of evolving a new form, both in architecture and photography that the
resulting expression was vitalized. Where in any medium has the
tremendous energy and potential power of New York been more fully
realized than in the purely direct photographs of Stieglitz ? Where a
more subtle feeling which is the reverse of all this, the quiet simplicity
of life in the American small town, so sensitively suggested in the early
work of Clarence White? Where in painting, more originality and
penetration of vision than in the portraits of Steichen, Kasebier and
Frank Eugene? Others, too, have given beauty to the world but these
workers, together with the great Scotchman, David Octavius Hill,
whose portraits made in i860 have never been surpassed, are the im-
portant creators of a living photographic tradition. They will be the
masters no less for Europe than for America because by an intense
interest in the life of which they were really a part, they reached through
a national, to a universal expression. In spite of indifference, contempt
and the assurance of little or no remuneration they went on, as others
will do, even though their work seems doomed to a temporary obscur-
ity. The things they do remains the same; it is a witness to the motive
force that drives.
The existence of a medium, after all, is its absolute justification,
if as so many seem to think, it needs one and all, comparison of poten-
tialities is useless and irrelevant. Whether a water-color is inferior
to an oil, or whether a drawing, an etching, or a photograph is not
as important as either, is inconsequent. To have to despise something
in order to respect something else is a sign of impotence. Let us rather
accept joyously and with gratitude everything through which the spirit
of man seeks to an ever fuller and more intense self-realization.
Paul Strand.

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