Such people as Mrs. KŠsebier depicts are very scarce on our streets, and whenever they appear the do it to the great sorrow of the rest of humanity. Why should a respectable citizen be transformed into an eyesore? But Mr. Day, as well as Mrs. KŠsebier, pre-eminently wish it so, as they are eminently fit to represent that class of human beings who wear slouchy drapery instead of tailor-made costumes, and carry sunflowers, holy Grail cups or urns, filled -- I presume, with the ashes of deep thought -- in their hands. People do not seem to comprehend that it may seem to suit an idol-woman like Sarah Bernhardt to be represented with a statuette in her hand (besides she is a sculptress herself), but that it would be absurd to represent an ordinary society girl (third generation of a parvenu who married a washerwoman) in the same way. It merely shows the incompetence of the photographer to tell character.
I do not believe in Maeterlinckism. I mean by that a combination of all that is suggestive and modernizable in the old arts -- as one can trace, for instance, in Maeterlinck the influence of Greek simplicity. Chaucer's fancies, Japanese laws of repetition, of Shakespeare, Virgil, etc. -- our modern life is beautiful enough, and our modern garb in no way less picturesque or less absurd (just as you like) than that of Holbein's or Velasquez's time, and yet these men succeeded in rendering it stylistically without taking refuge in Assyrian and Egyptian fashions.
There is no sap of life in such art. It is still-born. The seeking of inspiration in the old masters without utilizing it in an original manner constitutes no creation. The intentional fabrication of a photograph to look like a Holbein drawing has nothing in common with the nobler aspirations of our age, and it is an insult to the colossal genius of that man who rooted in his time and mastered it.
Leave the work of those great mean undisturbed, except in hours devoted to a silent admiration! They have contributed their share to the history of art, and if you could only produce the epigrammatic suggestion of an original idea, such as they have created, you would deserve and gain your little niche in the Pantheon of fame!
Frank Eugene is a painter of remarkable versatility, who has taken recently to portrait photography, and not for a moment does he deny his original profession. He strives for the same picturesque muddiness in his plates as in his painting. He relies largely on his instinct. Mr. Day and Mrs. KŠsebier use a good deal of premeditation to arrange their subjects. Mr. Eugene knows at one glance what he can do with a sitter. He fakes up an artistic background out of gobelins, faded foliage, flowers, etc., throws some drapery over the lap or shoulder, lets somebody hold a mirror to throw a reflection on the fact, and takes the picture. All the others think to accomplish their results; he feels. Look, for instance, at his portrait of the Misses H. I have never seen anything so nonchalantly artistic in photography before. The accessories are marvelously interesting without hurting the importance of the figures. Not a master in the exercise of his new profession, he makes many technical mistakes, but he understands how to cover them up. He scribbles and scrawls and scratches on his plates in a manner to which Mrs. KŠsebier's "stopping out" processes, sprays, washes and baths are mere child's play. These corrections are not legitimate, but the are always right where he puts them, right for him and in the right place. He is a virtuoso in blurred effects, and understands values like few; his faces and shirt fronts never have the same values. He is little known to the photographic world at present, but I predict that his planned exhibition at the Camera Club next fall will be a revelation to many. He is, to my knowledge, the first American painter who has become a portrait photographer.
J. T. Keiley represents the Japanese phase in photography, which, for certain reasons, is very sympathetic to me. The "crazier" other people think them, the better I like them. It only shows that other people understand heartily little of the spirit of Japanese art, which the majority professes to admire so much. His blurred effects, his losing detail here and discarding it entirely there, and yet suggesting it frequently by an entirely empty place -- you see a line and yet it is not there -- are truly Japanese. The values of a beautiful head of hair are interesting enough, without the profile, neck, and shoulders, particularly if they are so delicately and poetically treated as Mr. Keiley at times succeeds in doing. If I were a Herrick I would write a villanelle to his "Japanese Coiffure." Yet these fragmentary outbursts of his muse can hardly be called portraits; they are studies (he wisely calls them so), and even if they should reproduce a complete face and neck, and not merely the vision of a shoulder, the broken silhouette of a seven-eighths view, or the fragile values of the sternoclido mastoid music, they will play frolic with the face of the vicarious sitter, who may be delighted, nevertheless, to know how he looks when conventionalized by Japanese codes of line, space, and tonal values.
The four artists (artist is the right expression for them; they are too much artists and not enough photographers -- Mrs. KŠsebier's ingenious signature alone shows that) have one grievous fault in common, they all overstep the limitations of photography. We may pardon a Wagner for ignoring the fundamental laws of music, but not a Mlle. Chaminade. All four experiment. They are modifiers of the half truth the camera is capable of telling, for retouching is nothing but an artful destruction of the light and modeling done so graciously by Dame Nature herself -- a covering up of technical mistakes, and the suppression, modification, accentuation, etc., of uncongruous details, until the picture looks no longer like a photograph, but is an hermaphroditic expression of one of the graphic arts. A plate on which retouching is necessary is not a perfect plate, that is all I have to say about it.
These photographers I am going to mention now, I believe they all are -- perhaps not as fanatically as myself -- adherents of photography "pure and simple." They disdain the assistance of retouching, by which Demachy in Paris and Einbeck in Hamburg have attained some of their most marvelous results. They realize that artistic photography to become powerful and self-subsistent must rely upon its own resources, and not ornament itself with foreign plumes, in order to resemble an etching, a poster, a charcoal or a wash drawing, or a KŠsebier reproduction of an old maser.
Miss Zaida Ben-Yœsef, G. Cox, R. Eickemeyer, Jr., and I believe also C. H. White, work in that direction. They are less burdened with aesthetic lore, and for that reason better adapted to photography. They want likenesses, and that alone can make portrait photography great.
Of C. H. White I have seen only one print, his "Mrs. H," which alone ranks him among the best portrait photographers. A modern girl in a summer dress, conventional even to the crease in front, that is all. The figure is as well posed as a Sargent. The tonal quality is admirable in its delicacy and clearness. The only faults I have to find are that the parasol is not rendered as interestingly as it could be, and that the picture on the wall would have improved the portrait if it had been a landscape or Japanese print instead of a head.
Miss Ben-Yœsef, of all the photographers I know, relies most on her camera. She is wise enough not to retouch. She is a fairly good character reader, and understands posing. She composes her pictures with the simplest means, without applying any special artistic arrangement; good taste and common sense seem to her sufficient. Her simplicity of purpose, the absence of affectation and of the display of great stores of knowledge is refreshing. She pursues her art on the right lines. It is only to be deplored that her work at present is so frightfully uneven. Many of her portraits are as bad as those of a Bowery photographer, while others, for instance her Anthony Hope (standing), is one of the most masterly plates in existence. The initial portrait of this article is a fair likeness; she got the swing of my body, although she knew me for scarcely an hour then. The arm akimbo and the background on the left, however, are uninteresting.
Cox has taken several remarkable portrait heads, among which the head of Whitman belongs to the best. There we have a strong, straightforward handling, that knows what it is about; no wayward caprice -- a simple, decided, and genuine method. One can speak neither of elegant taste, nor individuality of characterization but the unity, simplicity, and breadth of his execution is beyond praise. It is Whitman unmistakably for all those who have known the "good gray poet" when he was in the "sands of seventies," by far more enjoyable than Alexander's portrait in the Metropolitan.
Breese and Eickemeyer have produced one plate that deserves unstinted recognition -- the portrait of Yvette Guilbert called "Le DŽsir," which shows that they only meant it to be a study. Although this picture contains enough of a certain phase of Yvette Guilbert's art, a certain wanton forgetfulness characteristic of this "Lady of Vain Virtue" (as Rossetti might call her), it is not, and could not be, a portrait. We Americans have never known the real Yvette Guilbert -- the "female faun" -- and all on account of her wearing a wig here, while in Paris she appeared with her own carrot-red hair. In New York she was a naughty pre-Raphaelite maiden, while at the "Concert Parisien" she represented Ugliness singing the misery and frivolity of modern society. Nor was I aware that lilies of the valley expressed desire; lilacs would have been more appropriate. Or did the Carbon Studio wish to convey that nervous Yvette Guilbert fell into a trance by inhaling the pure innocent odor of lilies of the valley -- a combination of refinement and na•vetŽ, as we see in Chavannes' mural decorations? I hardly think so.
Much more to the point, though less curious, are Eickemeyer's study of a ranchman and the portrait of his father. That is portrait photography. There is no transfiguring, magnifying, and generalizing of reality. Exactitude is in no way violated. And they are not accidents. Eickemeyer is only too scientific; he may be naive in the symbolism of flowers, but not in his technical methods. Read his "How a Picture Was Made," and you will know what hard and severe training he has gone through, and what strenuous study he has made. He also is on the right track, although a little more temperament would not harm him.
About Alfred Stieglitz as a portrait photographer I am not equally certain. We all know that a student of photography could not have (in reference to technical usages) a better master than he. He is a fanatic of simplicity, but has done too few portraits, and these not individual enough to make an estimate. In his "Mr. R" -- exact and cold like science, which may be a merit as it happens to represent a professor -- he has succeeded very admirably indeed. The monotonous line of the left arm and the veins of his right hand, however, disturb my enjoyment. At all events it is a valuable object lesson, and as such worth hanging up where students congregate.
Letting all these artists pass in review once more in my mind's eye, it seems to me that after all the genius of the painter, comparatively speaking, is more successful in getting an artistic likeness than the mechanism of photography. This is largely due to the fact that, with very few exceptions, only mediocre talents have been drawn to the rubber bulb and focusing cloth. Artistic temperaments have avoided photography in fear of its restrictions, and so it has come to pass that until now the word genius could never be applied to any craftsman in this special branch of artistic photography.
The range of the technical expression of photography, in comparison with painting, is indeed very limited. First of all it lacks color. It controls line only as far as it is produced by broad opposite lights and shade (of which Mr. White's print is such an excellent example); it is impossible to accentuate any special part, as, for instance, Bastien-LePage has done in the back of Sarah Bernhardt. One cannot produce a clear, unhesitating line full of life from beginning to end. Also in representing texture, photography is handicapped. Of course the camera reproduces only too faithfully certain unimportant details, but the surface is always the same, unless where you retouch it so cleverly that it will suggest variety. It commands, however, tonality, but that other arts also convey equally well, and if photography is ever expected to assert itself as one of the independent -- and probably for a long time to come -- minor arts, it has to develop that quality which no other medium has in common with it. The beauty of blurred lines, produced by the action of light, for photography does not draw lines but rather suggests them by painting values, may be compared in importance to the linear expression of etching or wood engraving,* and the massing of black (viz., Goya) and the moss-like gradations of gray (viz., Whistler) in lithography. These arts, although allowing big scope to creative power, are exposed to a certain restriction in regard to subjects. This is not the case with photography, as it has the power to express movement, for instance the spontaneity of facial expression, which no other art can do in the same degree and with the same ease.
What artistic photography needs is an expert photographer, who is at the same time a physiognomist and a man of taste, and great enough to subordinate himself to his machine; only a man thus adequately endowed could show us a new phase in portraiture, with which even the eye and hand of the painter would find it difficult to compete.
However, only when color photography has been made possible, and kinetoscope photography in the hand of artists has developed to that extent that full justice can be done to the spontaneity of actual movement -- to the continuous, almost undiscernible changes in a human face, the delicate nuances in the evolution of a smile, or any other human sentiment, passion, or common every-day expression of routine life -- will artistic portrait photography fulfill its highest vocation. For would we not prefer a fragment of our children's life represented in actual movement, just as if they were alive, to any representation of one stereotyped position by a painter, no matter how skillful? A child looking roguishly at us, quickly changing its facial expressions into a smile, would mean infinitely more (and it would be equally artistic) than if a Sargent would place the same child like a big doll under a still bigger vase in a hall vibrant with emptiness (viz., Sargent's "Hall of the Four Children"). And a characteristic gesture, a pensive attitude, or furtive movement of one's wife, as expressed by the kinetoscope of the future, would be much more valuable than the rare aesthetic pleasure of letting Watts wrap her up in a pre-Raphaelite soul-mist, or Lenbach draw her picture in lines worthy of a Herodotus, or Boldini make her look like a languid bachantee of modern joy.
But artistic kinetoscope photography in color is so far off! We have to deal with the present, have to make the best of existing conditions, and form from them, if we possess the power and are unselfish enough, those foundations on which the photography of the future will construct itself.
