Adventures in the Arts / Informal Chapters on Painters, Vaudeville, and Poets

by Marsden Hartley

THE APPEAL OF PHOTOGRAPHY

Photography is an undeniable esthetic problem upon our modern artistic horizon. The idea of photography as an art has been discussed no doubt ever since the invention of the pinhole. In the main, I have always said for myself that the kodak offers me the best substitute for the picture of life, that I have found. I find the snapshot, almost without exception, holding my interest for what it contains of simple registration of and adherence to facts for themselves. I have had a very definite and plausible aversion to the "artistic" photograph, and we have had more than a surfeit of this sort of production for the past ten or fifteen years. I have referred frequently in my mind to the convincing portraits by David Octavius Hill as being among the first examples of photographic portraiture to hold my own private interest as clear and unmanipulated expressions of reality; and it is a definite as well as irresistible quality that pervades these mechanical productions, the charm of the object for its own sake.

It was the irrelevant "artistic" period in photography that did so much to destroy the vital significance of photography as a type of expression which may be classed as among the real arts of today. And it was a movement that failed because it added nothing to the idea save a distressing superficiality. It introduced a fog on the brain, that was as senseless as it was embarrassing to the eye caring intensely for precision of form and accuracy of presentation. Photography was in this sense unfortunate in that it fell into the hands of adepts at the brush who sought to introduce technical variations which had nothing in reality to do with it and with which it never could have anything in common. All this sort of thing was produced in the age of the famous men and women, the period of eighteen ninety-five to nineteen hundred and ten say, for it was the age when the smart young photographer was frantic to produce famous sitters like Shaw and Rodin. We do not care anything about such things in our time because we now know that anybody well photographed according to the scope as well as the restrictions of the medium at hand could be, as has been proven, an interesting subject.

It has been seen, as Alfred Stieglitz has so clearly shown, that an eyebrow, a leg, a tree trunk, a body, a breast, a hand, any part being equal to the whole in its power to tell the story, could be made as interesting, more so indeed than all the famous people in existence. It doesn't matter to us in the least that Morgan and Richard Strauss helped fill a folio alongside of Maeterlinck and such like persons. All this was, of course, in keeping with the theatricism of the period in which it was produced, which is one of the best things to be said of it. But we do know that Whistler helped ruin photography along with Wilde who helped ruin esthetics. Everyone has his office nevertheless. As a consequence, Alfred Stieglitz was told by the prevailing geniuses of that time that he was a back number because of his strict adherence to the scientific nature of the medium, because he didn't manipulate his plate beyond the strictly technical advantages it offered, and it was not therefore a fashionable addition to the kind of thing that was being done by the assuming ones at that time. The exhibition of the life-work of Alfred Stieglitz in March, 1921, at the Anderson Galleries, New York, was a huge revelation even to those of us who along with our own ultra modern interests had found a place for good unadulterated photography in the scheme of our appreciation of the art production of this time.

I can say without a qualm that photography has always been a real stimulus to me in all the years I have been personally associated with it through the various exhibitions held along with those of modern painting at the gallery of the Photo-Secession, or more intimately understood as "291". Photography was an interesting foil to the kind of veracity that painting is supposed to express, or rather to say, was then supposed to express; for painting like all other ideas has changed vastly in the last ten years, and even very much since the interval created by the war. I might have learned this anywhere else, but I did get it from the Stieglitz camera realizations with more than perhaps the expected frequency, and I am willing to assert now that there are no portraits in existence, not in all the history of portrait realization either by the camera or in painting, which so definitely present, and in many instances with an almost haunting clairvoyance, the actualities existing in the sitter's mind and body and soul. These portraits are for me without parallel therefore in this particular. And I make bold with another assertion, that from our modern point of view the Stieglitz photographs are undeniable works of art, as are also the fine photographs of the younger men like Charles Sheeler and Paul Strand. Sheeler, being also one of our best modern painters, has probably added to his photographic work a different type of sensibility by reason of his experience in the so-called creative medium of painting. It is, as we know, brain matter that counts in a work of art, and we have dispensed once and for all with the silly notion that a work of art is made by hand. Art is first and last of all, a product of the intelligence.

I think the photographers must at least have been a trifle upset with this Stieglitz Exhibition. I know that many of the painters of the day were noticeably impressed. There was much to concern everyone there, in any degree that can be put upon us as interested spectators. For myself, I care nothing for the gift of interpretation, and far less for that dreadful type of effete facility which produces a kind of hocus-pocus technical brilliancy which fuddles the eye with a trickery, and produces upon the untrained and uncritical mind a kind of unintelligent hypnotism. Art these days is a matter of scientific comprehension of reality, not a trick of the hand or the old-fashioned manipulation of a brush or a tool. I am interested in presentation pure and simple. All things that are living are expression and therefore part of the inherent symbology of life. Art, therefore, that is encumbered with excessive symbolism is extraneous, and from my point of view, useless art. Anyone who understands life needs no handbook of poetry or philosophy to tell him what it is. When a picture looks like the life of the world, it is apt to be a fair picture or a good one, but a bad picture is nothing but a bad picture and it is bound to become worse as we think of it. And so for my own pleasure I have consulted the kodak as furnishing me with a better picture of life than many pictures I have seen by many of the so-called very good artists, and I have always delighted in the rotograph series of the Sunday papers because they are as close to life as any superficial representation can hope to be.

It was obvious then that many of those who saw the Stieglitz photographs, and there were large crowds of them, were non-plussed by the unmistakable authenticity of experience contained in them. If you stopped there you were of course mystified, but there is no mystery whatever in these productions, for they are as clear and I shall even go so far as to say as objective as the daylight which produced them, and aside from certain intimate issues they are impersonal as it is possible for an artist to be. It is this quality in them which makes them live for me as realities in the art world of modern time. All art calls for one variety of audacity or another and so these photographs unfold one type of audacity which is not common among works of art, excepting of course in highly accentuated instances of autographic revelation. It is the intellectual sympathy with all the subjects on exhibition which is revealed in these photographs: A kind of spiritual diagnosis which is seldom or never to be found among the photographers and almost never among the painters of the conventional portrait. This ability, talent, virtue, or genius, whatever you may wish to name it, is without theatricism and therefore without spectacular demonstration either of the sitter or the method employed in rendering them.

It is never a matter of arranging cheap and practically unrelated externals with Alfred Stieglitz. I am confident it can be said that he has never in his life made a spectacular photograph. His intensity runs in quite another channel altogether. It is far closer to the clairvoyant exposure of the psychic aspects of the moment, as contained in either the persons or the objects treated of. With these essays in character of Alfred Stieglitz, you have a series of types who had but one object in mind, to lend themselves for the use of the machine in order that a certain problem might be accurately rendered with the scientific end of the process in view, and the given actuality brought to the surface when possible. I see nothing in these portraits beyond this. I understand them technically very little only that I am aware that I have not for long, and perhaps never, seen plates that hold such depths of tonal value and structural relationship of light and shade as are contained in the hundred and fifty prints on exhibition in the Anderson Galleries. Art is a vastly new problem and this is the first thing which must be learned. Precisely as we learn that a certain type of painting ended in the history of the world with Cézanne.

There is an impulse now in painting toward photographic veracity of experience as is so much in evidence in the work of an artist of such fine perceptions as Ingres, with a brushing aside of all old-fashioned notions of what constitutes artistic experience. There is a deliberate revolt, and photography as we know it in the work of Alfred Stieglitz and the few younger men like Strand and Sheeler is part of the new esthetic anarchism which we as younger painters must expect to make ourselves responsible for. It must be remembered you know, that there has been a war, and art is in a condition of encouraging and stimulating renascence, and we may even go so far as to say that it is a greater world issue than it was previous to the great catastrophe. And also, it must be heralded that as far as art is concerned the end of the world has been seen. The true artist, if he is intelligent, is witness of this most stimulating truth that confronts us. We cannot hope to function esthetically as we did before all this happened, because we are not the same beings intellectually. This does not mean in relation to photography that all straight photography is good. It merely means that the kind of photography I must name "Fifth Avenue" art, is a conspicuous species of artistic bunkum, and must be recognized as such.