Photography a Fine Art

Manawatu Times, Volume LIV, Issue 6844, 25 February 1929, Page 4

Photography a Fine Art

tography -would appear to be limitless —which is doubtless another way of saying that it remains always contemporary, no matter how taxing new trends and modes in art may be (writes Edward Alden Jewell in a review of current photographic activity). Untravelled avenues are constantly opening out before the explorer. The thrill of the undiscovered is ever at hand. Photography has travelled far since a Frenchman, nearly a century ago, offered the world its first guerreotype.

of artist * c p k°

Yet the journey has entailed no weariness. Although science and artistry have increased year by year, there has not been any corresponding tendency to grow cold and pedantic. Youth’s verve and spontaneity have enlivened all the recent showings. A great deal of really beautiful work has been displayed, work that in its multiplicity of taste proves photography to be an art in which the individual may express himself with fluency and freedom. In the camp of the camera there are academicians as well as radicals; and in photography, as in painting and sculpture, it is the radicals who do most of the exploring. A camera is an obliging instrument, a box of many tricks. Out of this box you may tempt just about anything you like; portraiture, landscape and still life in as many styles as there are styles in painting. You snap the face of your friend or you studiously contrive it. Light and shadow are recorded or provided .to suit your whim. True, your camera will produce wonders only when intelligently coaxed. Sometimes the coaxing required is prodigious; and it is but fair to the photographer to add that most of the extraordinary effects are wrought after the camera itself has been laid aside, with lens at rest. Long and complicated are the process whereby art photography is fashioned; all the retouching, the toning down, treatment with various chemicals, getting rid of unnecessary features, introduction of features not in the picture as recorded by the camera, and so on. And yet the preliminary work is by no means unimportant.

Photography has of late shown a particularly keen interest in the still life, and striking results have been obtained. Materials are arranged just as they would be arranged by a painter. The camera, being a highly accomplished draftsman, makes it unnecessary for one to know anything at all about drawing. But this advantage is off-set by the photographer’s having to possess a very nice sense of form relationships, of composition rhythms. A jug’s shadow may be more important than the jug itself. Another vogue concerns detail alone. The photographer who has not discovered the aesthetic charm of his kitchen spigot should investigate at once. Polished nickel or copper presents a fine surface for highlights. Let bright illumination stream obliquely upon the spigot through an enamelled drain, so that shadows are thrown on the porcelain back of the sink, with a saucepan placed below, and you are 1 sure of a novel composition.

Purely experimental devices one frequently e counters. There was a picture in the International Salon at the Camera Club called ‘‘Synthetic Por-

trait,” sent over by a Holland photographer. It looked like a woodcut or a linoleum block, and the effect had probably been achieved by boldly slicing away parts of the gelatine. Now, is artistic photography “wrong?” That is, does it represent neither art nor true photography? The dispute has been long and acrimonious. Furthermore, there is no truce iii sight. Concerning the issue of “dodging and faking,” R. Child Bayley, in his admirable volume, “The Complete Photographer,” remarks: “There is nothing to which the purist can take exception in any of the processes employed to alter the strictly photographic result, provided always the purist is not able to detect that they have been employed. If their use is apparent, then it is to be deprecated, not because it is not pure photography, whatever that may be, but because the art of the photographer has not been successful in concealing his art. Few, Indeed, are the photographs that cannot be improved by judicious handling, but when the handling asserts itself as handling it is no longer an improvement.”

“Is photography art?” asks Wallace Nutting in his able little work on “Photographic Art Secrets” (1927). “Most of it,” he decides, “is not. A vast deal of nontense has been uttered on this subject. Highly competent artists have sometimes bothered themselves to assail the humble photographer because he poses as an artist. It is doubtless an error for a portrait protographer or any other photographer so to advertise himself. To do so is to arrogate to one’s self capacities which one does not possess . . . To forefend the quibble that photographs are not art, let us call them,” he suggests, "artisanship —when they are.” The same pivotal query was posed a few months ago by Floyd Vail, F.R.P.S. in an address. His answer

was in the affirmative, though he took pains to point out that in the hands of thousands of untrained photographers, past ,and contemporary, work done with the camera cannot be termed art. It is always a matter of quality—in this as in every other medium. Mr. Vail recalled the contention that photography cannot be art because it is mechanical, made with a machine, and added: “It was once said of painting that it was mechanical because it was ‘made with the hand.' Painting is done on a canvas placed on an easel with brushes held by tlib hand, with pigments manufactured, mixed and laid on. But the artist’s will directs all, and his vision and brain select and shape—create if you will. All the things enumerated are just so many tools that he employs. So with the photographer; his camera is his easel, his plate the canvas to take the image, his lens is his brush and Old Sol his pigments. His will, vision, brain control, direct, form the picture, determining the art. Is this mechanical? Then all artistic productions are mechanical.”