“Not at all,” I said. “One has to be trained to understand pictures, as one has to be trained to see.” I told them of Turner, whose pictures look beautiful to some, and to others are mere blotches of color.
“A picture is not what it represents,” I said. “One must learn to see it. A proof of this is that babies, quite able to recognize objects, do not recognize pictures. And so some people are babies all their lives in relation to art.
“Now,” I asked, “do any of you think photographs artistic?”
I believe Henry was going to say he did, but was overwhelmed by the others. Alfred said: “In a photograph all the unimportant things are there with the important.”
Marian said that there, as in life, there was intrusion of inharmonious details.
The out-of-focus and blurred photograph sometimes is artistic, because of the lost details and the effect of distance; but, just therefore, it is untrue to fact.
Virginia said photographic art was bad art. She said: “My teacher gave a good example. If a fire-engine were tearing along the street, you would be so interested in that you would see nothing else. There might be crowds of people, but you would not notice them. But if a camera were to be snapped, they would all be in it and obscure the engine. You see only what is important, but the camera sees everything.”
“That is a good illustration,” I said. “And so you see we are story-tellers in vision as well as in narrative. We see things complete and dramatic, whether they are so or not, just as we must tell a complete story. Do you realize how all the arts are related, how they all have the same laws? And these, I believe, are the laws of life.
“Did you ever think of it, that the artist sees only with his eyes, whereas you see with your eyes, fingers, ears, with all your senses? You see a table square, high, hard, smooth, but an artist sees it only in perspective, from a certain point of view. To get completeness you must limit yourself, because you cannot see the universe. The drop of water is most complete and perfect when it is a limited, spherical drop, not when it is scattered abroad in mist.
“The artist,” I said, “is one who sees things beautiful, even when to others they do not seem so; and to see things beautiful is to see truth.”