International studio (44.1911)

INTERNATIONAL
• STUDIO
VOL. XL1V. No. 174 Copyright, 1911, by John Lane Company AUGUST, 1911

ALFRED STIEGLITZ, PICTORIAL
/\ PHOTOGRAPHER
X—X BY J. NILSEN LAURVIK
Is pictorial photography to be con-
sidered one of the arts? I contend that it is. And
to those who are sensible to beauty in whatever
guise it comes I believe the accompanying illustra-
tions to this article, selected from a long series of
prints made by Mr. Stieglitz in the course of his
twenty-five years of photography, will confirm my
contention, despite the oft-reiterated statement of
painters and many writers on art that nothing
worthy of the name can possibly be produced with
a machine. These latter have fostered the idea,
long since accepted by the public and now wor-
shipped as a fetich, that whatever is made by hand
must necessarily be art, forgetting the while that
the few authentic things in art are the product of

the same fine intelligence and delicate perception
that may choose the camera as its medium of com-
municating to the world what it sees and feels;
that it is a matter of brains, not brushes, and that
where the artist is there art will be.
This insistance upon brush marks as technique
and technique as art has been the great stumbling
block to people seeing and enjoying for themselves
what is inherently beautiful, without regard to
what is right or what is wrong, until many, wholly
befuddled and discomfited by all this cant and
humbug about what is art, take refuge in that back
alley of individual discernment: “I don’t know
anything about art, but I know what I like,”
which is, perhaps, just as wise as the people who
know all about what is art, but don’t know what
they like when they see it. For both of these—
and they constitute a large part of the much-
talked-of “ art-loving public ”—pictorial photogra-


WET DAY ON THE BOULEVARD

BY ALFRED STIEGLITZ

XXI