Photographic Art

For beautiful image quality, the best of the old daguerreotypes have never been equalled. The positives were made directly on the metal base and the small pictures were esteemed for their exquisite rendering of fine detail. The photo-painters, who did away with all things characteristically photographic, often used papers of independently beautiful surface texture for their prints. The result of such a combination is that the paper competes with the image instead of becoming a part of it.

Among modern processes the nearest approach to the fine image quality of daguerreotypes is a waxed or glossy print. Unfor tunately glossy paper is still held in general disfavour among artist-photographers. It is said to be harsh and cold and only suitable for commercial work.

These erroneous beliefs are partly a hangover from the heyday of photo-painting and partly due to the difficulty of making good glossy prints. The glossy surface reveals the image with such clarity that minor blunders, which might escape detection on the more veiled, dull-surface papers, are at once exposed. How ever, the glossy surface has the advantage of a longer scale which makes it possible to reproduce more of the negative and allows a greater latitude in reproducing extremes of tone from the strongest to the most subtle and delicate. When a photographer speaks of the warm or cold tone of a print, he is usually referring to its colour; a cold blue-black as opposed to a warm green-black. But to use such variations of colour to emphasize the feeling of his picture is to misuse his medium. If he prints a snow scene blue-black so that it will look cold and a forest scene green-black so that it will appear warm, he is introducing a foreign element into his monochromatic process just as surely as if he coloured the print by hand. In black-and-white photography the effect of warmth or coldness should be communicated by the values in the print, whose colours should—at the extremes of the scale—be as nearly pure black and pure white as possible. (Use of obvious colour-tone belongs in the province of colour photography.) Ob viously then, the longer scale of glossy paper gives greater op portunity of producing through the values in the print whatever effect is desired.

And lastly, the luminous surface of the glossy paper, by making the image light-giving, comes nearer to rendering the effect of the original scene and so heightens the illusion of reality.

A good glossy print reveals the delicacy of subtle gradation, the lucidity of tone, and the brilliant clarity of image, that are unique characteristics of the photographic process.

Subject Matter.

It is impossible to make any sharp distinc tion between the subject matter appropriate to one graphic medium and that more suitable to another. But in the case of photography we can at least draw a few general conclusions, based on an examination of the work of the past and our knowledge of the special properties of the medium. From the wet plate era we may draw two contrasting examples that serve to indicate a field of endeavour in which the photographer is least likely to be successful. On the one hand we have the work of 0. G. Rej lander and Henry Peach Robinson, two men who achieved prom inence for their photographic work in England during the '5os and '6os. In their best known pictures (Rejlander's Two Ways of Life, and Robinson's Fading Away) they attempted to depict allegorical and dramatic situations by combining a number of negatives of posed and costumed figures into composite prints.

On the other hand we have the work of Mathew Brady, Alex ander Gardner, and many anonymous photographers who docu mented the American Civil War. These men were bound by no artistic purpose ; their sole aim was to record to the best of their ability every phase and aspect of the hostilities that their clumsy and limited equipment could encompass. Yet it is in these straight forward records that we perceive true photographic quality: here is the tremendous power and appeal of the camera's realism, the intensity of its vision undiluted, and these documents of the past still move us profoundly with their clear, objective picture of the horror and pathos of war. Beside these photographs the artistic efforts of Rejlander and Robinson appear self-conscious, stilted, and artificial. Their carefully posed and costumed figures look absurd and unreal.

Now this comparison makes one fact apparent: the camera lens sees too clearly to be used successfully for recording the super ficial aspects of a subject. It searches out the actor behind the make-up and exposes the contrived, the trivial, the artificial, for what they really are.