After more than a hundred years of experimentation and development, photography is said to have failed in the realization of the high hopes which were aroused by the early, pioneer achievements of the camera. Some magnanimous critics say that while much has been accomplished, photography has proven disappointing, even a failure.
I take issue with both these statements, for I hold that photography is a positive and additional medium of expression. This is not the opinion of a casual observer, but in my honest conviction resulting from nearly forty years' study of the subject. If it is a failure, then truth and everything else in life that we deem worth while is also a failure.
Photography is not an art. Neither is painting nor sculpture, literature nor music. They are only different media for the individual to express his aesthetic feelings; the tools he uses in his creative work. Consequently critics err who regard photography as a despised outcast from the sacred circle of Òart."
What is a photograph? Anything that is drawn by the rays of light and which is so chemically treated as to be fixed and permanent.
Critics say that one of the weaknesses of photography is that it shows things Òjust as they areÓ in a dead way, and that all aesthetic and spiritual quality which painters and sculptors attain is missing in the photograph.
This is true in most photographs, but it is not chargeable to photography, but to the individuals who are photographing. If a photographer has the aesthetic perception; if he feels living beauty in anything concrete that he wishes to photograph; if he is actually searching for the truth; he can get the spirit of it through the camera as well as the painter can through paint.
For instance, portrait painting is doomed. Painting portraiture will become obsolete when the time arrives that photographers will have learned something about portraiture in its deeper sense and when the public is weaned from the stupid superstition that a thing painted is necessarily better than a thing done through the new medium, photography.
There is abundant reason, however, for the criticism so freely directed against photography under existing conditions. It is not an exaggeration to say that ninety-nine and nine-tenths of all photographs today professing to have some aesthetic value are merely ÒartyÓ and have no right to exist. This results from the lack of vision and understanding of his material on the part of the photographer, his trick work, his retouching and lack of every true perception of photography's inherent possibilities. But the same thing holds good of men and women who produce things called oil paintings.
Occasionally a picture out of the commonplace is produced, a creative work. This because the producer was not merely a Òpainter," but an artist, a person with creative abilityÑnot merely an imitator of externals. Such a picture cannot be imitated, but thousands try to imitate it nevertheless, and the imitations are always disagreeable to the creatively receptive.
Color photography is still unsatisfactory. Millions of dollars have been spent in experiments and thousands of persons are at work on it everywhere the world over. The results thus far have been satisfactory commercially, perhaps, but from an aesthestic point of view thus far nothing has been accomplished. The reproductions of local color have nothing to do with aesthetic pleasure because of imitation.
The criticism has been made that no photograph can be as beautiful as an oil painting, because it is lacking in colors. This is not criticism, but stupidity, a lack of understanding of the underlying laws of beauty. It is the old story in another form: is a painting as beautiful as a sculpture, or is violin playing not greater than piano, and all similar nonsense.
It would be edifying to hear such critics express their preference between the paintings or the etchings of Rembrandt.
The attacks upon photography seemed to find their inception because of the ÒmachineÓ which the camera was dubbed, as opposed to the handwork of painters and sculptors. Yet this ÒmachineÓ can negate ninety-nine percent of what was and still is called painting. Through it a man who knows how to really photograph is able to channel the impulses of human beings and to register the objective world directly, through the science of optics and the chemistry of silver and platinum, translated into tonalities subtle beyond the reach of any human hand.
The early painter Memling, in his wonderful portraits, was in reality the first photographer. His idea of depicting his subject was photographic as I understand that term.
Photography is not superseding any living medium, but it has its own inherent virtues, as an additional tool which can be developed by those who recognize and feel their potential livingness.
Simply because the usual photograph can be done mechanically and easily, photography should not be despised as a mere matter of mechanism.
For that matter, though, you do not have to be a painter or sculptor to be an artist. You may be a shoemaker. You may be creative as such. And if so, you are a greater artist than the majority of the painters whose work is shown in the art galleries of today.
