After several weeks, in which you have certainly not been idle, I have received the prints taken from negatives produced with the new apparatus, and find them most interesting. They show that you have completely conquered the slight difficulties met with on the scientific side of photography, so wrongly thought by many to be the end of the art, and are now ready to try to make pictures with the tools you have selected, as other artists select, whether they will use the brush, the chisel, or the graver. Your prints show a great approach to mechanical excellence; they are fair to see; they are sharp, clear, soft, rich, of good color, but they are not pictures; they tell us nothing, there is not an idea in the lot; they are dead bodies, admirably embalmed, without a soul, amongst them. I speak very frankly, as I could not help gathering from your letter that you think these prints, because of their mechanical excellencies, approach very near to perfection; but I am anxious that mere executive dexterity should not have the first place in your mind.
Touching this same “something” beyond mere mechanical perfection in photographs, I think I had better say what I have to say about it at once, and get it out of the way. That much vexed question, is art possible in photography? has been discussed over and over again, yet I have always been content to keep out of the controversy, and with endeavoring to show, however feebly, in my work, how art could be made of it. I have never called myself an art photographer—that title is usually usurped by those who know nothing of art—but have been content and proud ‘to call myself simply a photographer, thinking it better to leave pretension to those who pretend. Nevertheless, I have always held a very firm belief, and had a profound faith, that photography used by an artist produces art.
The lines of those who now try to put a little art feeling into their photographs are laid in pleasanter places than were those who made the attempt a few years ago. There are still some who deny that anything artistic can be done by a photographer, but it is my experience that the best painters now call the photographer “brother” when he deserves it, and recognize that he can put thought, intention, and even a vein of poetry into his work-that mysterious something-beyond the border line of hard fact which is felt perhaps more than seen in a picture. Of course, it is only those who produce art, in whatever material, who should be called artists. Original genius is one of the rarest gifts in this age of imitation. Anything absolutely new seems to be almost impossible. Emerson says: “The new in art is always formed out of the old,” and unfortunately some of those original geniuses who create their novelties out of old ideas are not unlike that divine, “Who took his discourse from the famed Dr. Browne, But preached it so vilely he made it his own.”
It does not seem to be rightly understood what art is. A man might be a good painter or a good photographer without being an artist at all. A man who paints is not an artist because he paints, or a photographer an artist because he photographs. Both are artists when they can produce fine art with either paint or chemicals, or any other materials. The fact is the critics have confounded the art with the operator.
There can be no question that ninety-nine per cent. of the immense mass of photographs produced year after year have no claim to rank as art any more than the works of the millions of art students in this country can rank as art. That, however, is no reason why art cannot be produced by the camera. Every candid person knows it is, as usual, a question of degree. Art has been and is produced in the camera; the great difference is, that it is more difficult to produce art with our instruments than with the brush. I should be rash if I attempted to define minutely what fine art is, but I will limit myself to accepting the dictum that “art is the result, in the first place, of seeing rightly, and, in the second place, of feeling rightly, about what is seen.” I also hold it true that “art is interpretation by means of a creative idea, and never a stupidly exact copy.” There are, of course, incapable photographers, as there are incapable painters, but that is not the question. The question is, is it possible for a photographer to put his own ideas into his work, to alter, add to, or modify; or is photography to be, as Mr. Mantilini would say, “one demmed eternal grind?”
The camera may be a machine, if you like; I will go further, and admit that it is a machine, but you cannot be a machine if you would, and will not be able to prevent yourself putting yourself into your work for better or worse; indeed, there is so much mannerism in the work of many photographers, that one who is used to studying photographs scarcely requires the names of the producers. A year or two ago I was one of the judges at an exhibition. The names of the photographers were not given to us, but I soon found we were talking of the pictures as the work of So-and-so, and So-and-so, almost as freely as if we had been supplied with the names.
I have seen it argued, somewhere, that the charm and value of art consist, in every case, of its difference from nature as well as its likeness to it. There is just a slight streak of truth running through the idea. The difference is often the root of our enjoyment; old facts are presented to us in a new way and become more interesting, but when it is claimed that every step in advance from the mirror or camera to the master-pieces of painting and sculpture is a step of difference, we must pause. When the “difference” shows a purpose, an idea, or a sentiment, then the piece that is differentiated from nature becomes a work of art.
There is more common sense spoken about art now than there used to be. There is not so much said about the “awe-inspiring mysteries.” The painter now kindly allows that others may care for and be able to see and feel the beauties of nature. More than twenty years ago, when the opposition to art in photography was at its fiercest, there was a capital article on landscape painting in a now dead review. Of course its tendency was against there being any art in anything but paint. It was particularly severe on the “Chemical Mechanic,” and the author gives an illustration of how out of sympathy with nature the camera is. His illustration depends on the quality of the photographer he introduces. The mere fact of using a camera does not put a man out of tune with nature. That the exact opposite is the fact would be nearer the truth. The perfect and unadulterated loveliness of the conceit, that none but the painter artist can see and feel nature, is delicious. This is what he says:
“To begin with sympathy. In the midst of the forest when you are alone, and are beginning to hear the finer sounds, the turn of the leaf, the thud of the nut, did you ever feel as if you were an attraction there, as if all were drawing round you? I remember, when touring in Scotland, swinging out of a wood on the top of the stage from Oban, into a wide space of sea and sky, with a glorious foreground of cattle and their doubles in lucid shallows of the bay; color so pure, so bright, so precious, that it drew a grunt of admiration from the Highlander on the box. I was put down, and disposed myself quietly in a corner of the wood, and was soon part of the color, from the water to the sky. The ripple hardly broke louder than my pulse. Presently a stoat bounds into the road, and I had time to observe what enjoyment of life there was in the unalarmed, untamed step of the creature. The heron rose near me; and as I was beginning to take it all in with half-shut eyes, and to remark how the powerful tones of the cattle, fawn and flame color, white and yellow, blood-red and black, seemed to give infinitude to space, a photographer walks briskly before me, and with an air and noise of satisfaction begins to open and adjust his box. I give you my word that the look of quiet horror that came over the scene was unmistakable—not horror exactly—did you ever remark the face of a girl when she sets it? It was precisely that. Not only did the stoat disappear, but—I don’t know whether it was the creaking of the machine, or the business-like stare of the man—the cattle grew conscious and uncomfortable, and it was not without satisfaction that I saw a mist creep up from the sea, and steal away the shimmer and the charm. I left him some cows lashing their tails, some blackthorn and Scotch fir, and the average coast formation.”
All this is very fancifully and prettily written, and it serves to show with what contempt the painter treated the photographer twenty years ago. This sort of tip-tilting of the nose at photography as an art is only possible now with fifth-rate painters, or in the press, with their friends, or those who have failed in art.
Anyhow, what you have to do, and what other photographers have to do who care for the status of their profession, is to keep pegging away at the production of good pictures. Taking pleasure in your work, but never being satisfied; being always determined that the next picture shall be better than the last, your feeling for nature will increase and become more intense, and this love for and better understanding will shine forth in your work. As you progress you will find that, metaphorically, the stoat will be no longer startled or the bird disappear, the machine will no longer creak, and—who knows?—you may feel that you are an attraction to nature, and she may draw all around you as she did around the young gentleman who lay down in the corner of the wood.
You may console yourself further; you may feel that photography has taught art to artists. It is acknowledged that portrait painting has enormously advanced since the introduction of photography. Painters are now ashamed of the conventional absurdities of the pre-photographic days, when they “had plenty of taste, and all of it very bad!” The column with voluminous curtains dangling from the skies is now never seen.
Perhaps the photographer has taught the lesson, as the Spartans cured drunkenness, by showing awful examples; but the lesson was learnt, and portrait painting is now the one thing we have reason to be proud of in English art. Photographers had nothing but bad examples to follow in the portraiture of thirty or forty years ago, and most of their early faults in taste and composition were due to the painter’s work, which was then worshipped as art, and is now looked upon with contempt.