After hearing a symphony the score remains. After seeing a play the text remains. An exhibition, as soon as it is dispersed, leaves nothing but the general impression and a few cherished recollections, that we may realize again only according to their general sensitiveness and strength.
What is it that remains of the exhibition? Of what significance is photography artistically in these days of eclectic art expressions? This, I maintain, is what interests the true lover of photography most of all. Questions like these have nothing to do with the style of presentation, of mounting, hanging, and the exquisite proportions of the exhibition halls. It is the print itself, stripped of all embellishment, and the eye, brain, and hand behind it which tell the story.
I believe the old cry "art for art" has become meaningless. That some pictorialists have fashioned for themselves a personal mode of expression is an established fact. The victory of the photographic bureaucracy has been won long ago. It needs no further argument. We have learnt that a photographic print can be a thing of beauty aside from reference to any subject it portrays. The high average of excellence throughout the exhibit was astounding as it was exquisite.
Now, as heretofore, the pictorial army is divided in two camps, the Demachy-Eugene-Steichen camp who favor painter-like subjects and treatment, and the Stieglitz-White-Craig-Annan class who flock around the standard to true photographic themes and texture. The camp of the former, true evidently, becomes more and more deserted, the old flag hangs limp and the fires burn low -- only the dense and indifferent public, which is always behind the time, begins to patronize what was popular ten years ago. But in the rank and file the old feuds are forgotten. The artist who rose at dawn and measured swords with his critics has acquiesced. Each man went his own way, made his own audience, and challenged it for his own specific purposes.
The contention has become a much subtler one. What we would like to fathom is what photography can do better than any monochrome medium, not what it may do eventually, but what it has done. This is strictly a matter of technical consideration, as the aesthetic satisfaction derived from an art is in exact proportion to the public's knowledge of that art's technique. We know more about photography, and consequently are more deeply interested in the intricacies of the process. Photographic draftsmanship commands three technical preferences which are always evident when photography is at its best.
1. The image is actually drawn by light, and no other black and white medium can compete with this conveyance of the actual flow and shimmer of light, as it flits from object to object to the deepest shadows, still capable of preserving a degree of delicacy in the most solid black. Prints like White's "Portrait of Mrs. White," Laura Armer's "Mother and Child" and KŠsebier's "The Manger," to mention but a few, brought this out distinctly. As soon as the light is manipulated, it loses its greatest charm, and often becomes dull and chalky.
2. Line is invariably suggested by the gradation of tonal planes. Precise, or blurred, it is drawn entirely by the differentiation of values. This absence of actual line is possible in other mediums but achieved only with great difficulty, while it is natural to photography, and consequently one of its powerful characteristics. All prints excepting those of the extreme tonalists express this quality.
3. As it is impossible to emphasize line except by juxtaposition of values, that tone ( a subtle variation of hues within one tint) is one of the most favorable formulae of photographic picture-making (viz., Craig Annan and De Meyer still-lifes). Tone in this sense has never been produced with equal perfection except by American wood engraving.
In subject matter the studio print and landscape photography have advanced but few themes, if any have been brought out. They are borrowed largely from the other arts. It is the men who have preferred the city streets, the impressionism of life, and the unconventional aspects of nature to costuming and posing, who have occasionally enriched our wealth of pictorial impressions. In many instances they have discovered and subdued new and unusual motifs and improvised upon the laws of composition with the skill of true virtuosos. I refer in particular to Stieglitz's skyscrapers and dock scenes, and some of Coburn's interpretations of city views.
One can hardly say that photographic picture-making up to this day has revealed much of spiritual gravity. It is mobile and complete, but not splendidly audacious conceptually. Only in rare instances does it reflect actual mentality, as in the works of Steichen and the Viennese. Perhaps this is a limitation of the pictorial print of portfolio size. Its masterpieces may be defined as perfect beauty of visional appreciation joined to perfect beauty of technical expression. Elaborate figure compositions belong rather to the domain of snapshot photography. It is the single image, the attitude of a figure, the tonal fragment, a glass among shadows, a fleeting expression or some atmospheric condition, which adds something to our consciousness of beauty.
These reflections in a way are the result of my visit to the Albright Art Gallery. No doubt, any student of photography bent upon analysis of its aesthetic significance, has arrived at similar conclusions, but it was never brought out more clearly, more convincingly than at Buffalo. The photographer had a chance to realize the possibilities and limitations of his medium.
But there was something else which could not be seen, but only felt, which emanated as it were from the walls, and which pervaded the entire exhibit. It is difficult to express it in words. An ensemble so exceptional, aside of all actualities, teaches a lesson of deeper significance. It was combined in the spirit which provoked it. I sit at my desk and wonder how such a refined sensation of visional joy mingled with an appreciation of the mind so deep and true, as I experienced walking through these large peaceful galleries, could ever have been conjured up in this diffident, commerce-sodden community. It can only be the result, I mused, of the natural exaltation of a mind free from prejudices (except it were directed against insincerity), solely as the pursuit of some lofty ideal. And I must confess that I have never met a group of men who have taken their vocation more seriously and disinterestedly than these pictorialists.
Art today in many instances is so mechanical and imitative, so time-pleasing and coin-of-fact that one greets these workers with exceptional feelings of sympathy and appreciations. Not that they are necessarily visionary and fanatic. No, they are practical enough, for it demands a particular temperament to be a successful pictorialist. There enters into his make-up a certain amount of patience and scientific calculation which is foreign to the average artist's nature. But they possess the vital spark. Their art expression is germinal, not mimetic. They have put themselves at the service of a new medium, and they endeavor to conquer it. No matter how eclectic they may be, they at least freshly comprehend, reassimilate, readopt accepted principles of beauty to a new virile condition. And thanks to these finer artistic faculties and sensibilities, to their subjective process of taste and ideality the success of the exhibition was due. There workers realize that their art instincts must blossom forth into wholesome consciousness as natural expansion before their medium of expression can take its proper and its fullest meaning. And it was this spirit which made the Albright Exhibit of November, 1910, memorable in the annals of photography and art.
Like the delicious odors in some mirrored cabinet that lingers indefinitely for years, this spirit will not fade. It will be remembered long after individual efforts have lost their immediate usefulness. The few masterpieces will remain, the rest will be forgotten, but the spirit will continue to remain an active force, and produce fresh impressions of light and tone, of form and grace.
