IS PHOTOGRAPHY A FINE ART ?
MANY people, amongst them the majority of painters, deny that pictorial photography has any claim what- ever to rank as a fine art. Photographers themselves, rather naturally, take an opposite view. The gulf—never to be bridged —between a photograph, however beautiful, however true, and a painting, however full of shortcomings, lies in this fact : that the one is simply a natural phenomenon and the other a human aspiration. One comes about by natural laws over which man- kind is powerless, except by way of disturbing their conditions ; the other is, from incentive to completion, man's own self- guided effort to a shade and a hair's-breadth. The pressure of a button by an idiot, and a few simple operations by a moderately deft schoolboy, may result in a picture of extreme beauty. Are we to call this art ? A little mechanism has often made it possible for a bird to take its own photograph. Are the motions of the wild thing in the snare of the nature of the fine arts ? It is not enough for the photographer that he is able to produce beautiful and desirable pictures. He is possessed of a vaulting ambition to have them recognised as the children of his own emotions. To this ambition may be traced the ever-increasing number of " dodges." " fakes " (accepted terms), and processes for altering the aspect of a negative and admitting modification in a print. By these means enormous latitude is placed at the disposal of photo- graphers, of whom about one in a hundred has a grain of power to turn it to advantage. None the leas, the one in a hundred is forced to stand aside whilst the negative makes itself—a not inconsiderable part of the proceedings— but he brings in his revenges with the printing processes, when his intervention produces a result so controlled sometimes that the negative thereof knows it no more. But there are purists also who, whilst upholding the claims to the title of art, complicate affairs by setting themselves against the allurements of the " art " methods of the modifiers. They rely upon the straightforward operations of science, con- trolled by their own taste in matters pictorial. It is civil war, and the great campaign of photography as a fine art is weakened by the dissension. The purists object that the modifiers lose photographic character. The modifiers reply : "And a good thing too, for that is just what stands in the way of the art we aspire to."
M. Robert Demachy, a worker of undoubted artistic ability and feeling, has been writing spirited letters to the English photographic Press, flinging down a gauntlet and daring the whole world to prove that his pictures are any the less photo- graphs for being at the same time his means of artistic expression in negative-faking and print-painting. Mr. George Bernard Shaw, who is, amongst other things, a photographer, and who can always be relied upon for stepping into any arena, arrives with a bound and a flourish. With an indignant " What's all this ? " he commences to lay about him in his redoubtable style. M. Demachy's contention is that art is impossible in a " straight " print. He affirms with obvious truth that it is useless for a man to attempt art through mechanical means ; that although Nature may be beautiful, the mere reproduction of its beauty is not art, for art cannot exist without the intervention of the artist in the making of
the picture. Re concludes a letter in- these-words : -" Nature is but' a theme for the artist to play upon. Straight photography registers the theme—that is all—and, between ourselves, it registers it indifferently." This is all excellently sound; but M. Demachy knows quite well that his intervention when "piling on pigment," and in other ways, is not photography at all, and therefore cannot count in the argument. He chafes Mr. Shaw most sorely when 'be maintains that in picture-making the methods of painting are incontestably superior to' those of photography. Mr. Shaw asks: ` What's all this about methods of art which are incontestably superior to photography ? What are they? Name them. I deny their existence." If Mr. Shaw takes that Hite, he will certainly find many backers in the photo- graphic community. For it is a strange thing, but a true one, that in spite of their emulation of professional artists, amateur photographers are, as a body, by no means admiringly disposed towards them. A favourite aphorism of camera amateurs is that a good photograph is better than a bad painting, and their general attitude leads one to believe that they think there are few of the opposite variety in either case. But the arch enemy of painters is Mr. Shaw himself. He has taken many opportunities of asserting that they are bunglers and muddlers; that "the clumsy hand of man" is nowhere beside the record of a camera ; and that Velazquez, if he had been a photographer, would have made a much finer thing of the head of Philip IV. Perhaps Mr. Shaw will be generally held quite welcome to a sole proprietorship in such opinions. But he is right when he contends that there are certain things which photography can do better than painting; as right as he is wrong when be denies the inverse fact. Nobody gain- says that photography, when it is let alone, gives perfect gradation of tone; but such a thing as elimination, which is probably of greater importance in fine art, is impossible to pure photography.
Another fact which Mr. Shaw denies the existence of is that photography has limitations. It is charitable to suppose that if he cannot see them, his blindness is due rather to ardour in the conflict than to defect of intellectual vision. Certainly no other photographer has been known to deny the limitations. Mr. Shaw must know that nothing can be photo- graphed which has not a physical existence and the power of emitting rays of light. Compared with what is possible in painting or sculpture, or any other fine art, this is limitation enough in all conscience. Since the camera cannot invent, there is but one way possible for photography to represent things that are out of reach in respect to time and space, and that way is so paltry and cumbersome as to be in most cases not worth the trouble, even when it lends itself to the purpose. This one and only way is the way of the mice-en-seine, and its triumphs are the highest level of the cinematograph. Something of the sort has been attempted many times for the illustration of stories, but generally with dire artistic failure. Even show- cards and posters cannot turn photography to pleasing account. All historical and reconstructive work must go by the board,— all objects and places of the imagination, the characters of 3nythology, and the fancies due to poetic and religious fervour. Such subjects have often been attempted in the name of fine art, and with a sort of insistence that photography can be made to do more than imitate. As a matter of fact, it cannot. Imitation is the one great and damning limitation separating photography irrevocably from the fine arts. The fine arts may be imitative at times, but never that alone. If they were, their title would be forfeit. Nevertheless photo- graphers do argue that their craft is something more. Mr. Frederick H. Evans, whose architectural studies are perhaps the finest in the world, writes on the matter of this controversy, stating that Whistler somewhere said : "Art must never be a statement, always an evocation." He then affirms that certain photographs of Cathedrals upon his walls are true evocations of those buildings in very characteristic moods. He asks what old paintings of interiors are, if not imitative; then, barking back to Whistler, observes that "any mood that is successfully evoked and conveyed to another, becomes art." He is easily answered, however. In the first place, there is no logic in assuming that because art should be an evocation, every evocation must be art. Evocation is not enough in itself. As to the old pictures, since particulars are not specified, it is impossible to discuss their claims; they may be much more than imitative. All the arguments of photographers deal with finished results ; they do not apply at all to the growth and develop-
ment, the means, the mastery, the how-it's-done charm, which in real works of art have almost a biographical interest for those who can follow the artist's purpose. This is the human note for which we love a work of art, whether it be admired for beauties or not. But the photographer says : " What does it matter how I get my result so long as it gives pleasure in the end ? " The question at first may sound unanswerable; but there is an answer, and in it may be found the solution of the difficulty. The answer is this : If pleasure-giving is your only aim, it does not matter a scrap; but if upon this pleasure- giving result you are basing claims to a place among those who are practising the fine arts, it matters a great deal, for a thing that gives pleasure is not necessarily a work of art. That phrase implies a much more indispensable condition, which is, that the work must have been brought into being entirely by the band of man, every action of which has been prompted by his mind. A. gem may give pleasure; but it is not a work of art until it has been engraved by an artist. Neither gems, nor flowers, nor snow crystals, nor frost patterns, nor the symmetries of the kaleidoscope, nor pictures in bubbles, nor those of the camera obscure, nor photographs are works of art ; they are simply various beauties of natural phenomena. Fine art requires the effort, even the struggle, of the artist throughout all the stages of its production. The result, by reason of human shortcomings, may fall short of beauty; but the effort, by reason of human aspiration and the employment of faculties for form or colour, remains art. The effort of a photographer is the admitting of light into a box and the manipulation of chemicals,--processes which modern enterprise has rendered all but automatic. It may be asked : "What of the selection of subject ? " To which the reply is that the more artistic the photo- grapher the better his selection. Who dare say more ? If Raphael and Rembrandt had taken photographs, their prints would not have been works of art for this reason: that in the operations producing the pictures their artistic faculties would have "stepped out," to borrow M. Demachy's phrase.
It would be strange indeed if the invention of photography had produced a crop of many thousands of artists during the last half-century! To an artist the description and quality of his tools are affairs of little moment. He can extemporise materials without much trouble. The painter can paint with a rag and some soot; the sculptor can make you a man out of mud; but the photographer without his camera is lost. He is the slave of his paraphernalia. The underlying faculties which make a man an artist in any medium allow him opportunities in any other. Moreover, the evidences of those faculties in a work of art must bear witness to cultiva- tion. The faculties themselves may be highly developed in mental strength ; but if they have not been applied and developed physically they cannot make an artist of their possessor, though they can occasionally make him an excellent critic and connoisseur. An artist is like a poet: ideas are useless to him unless he knows his trade well enough to give them worthy form. How much of the artist's trade is known by a photographer, as a photographer ? Not solely on account of their ideas are Rembrandt and Corot giants in art, but because they were good craftsmen, with eyes taught to see and hands taught to perform. Photographers seem to think that any glimmering of these faculties, however arrested in development, is sufficient for their claims.
To-day the amateur stands at a point of eminence. He has created industries and bolstered up the failing retail chemist. He has a literature all to himself. He hires art galleries for the exhibition of his works. His critics discuss his output with all the jargon of the painter's studio. He signs his prints with bold legibility, and occasionally adorns their margins with a remarque. It is his great concern to prevent their resemblance to anything usually recognised as belonging to a photograph, and he devises means to give them the look of any variety of the graphic arts. He talks of "drawing" as though he had a band in it. In short, he lacks no outward and visible sign of the artist. But the possession of a camera does not argue the existence of artistic faculty. When a man can reach a certain degree of graphic power he does not hanker after a camera. It is not denied that photo- . graphers are often artistic ; but it is denied that the practice
of photography has any claim to be accounted fine art, or that it can confer the title of artist—in the full sense of the word— upon a photographer.
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