Naturalistic Photography for Students of the Art.

by P. H. Emerson

“High Art” photographers.

We have amongst photographers to-day persons who pride themselves on their skill in taking out of a photograph double chins, wrinkles, freckles, and all the character of a face, and who call themselves, we believe, “high art photographers,” mere flatterers of mankind’s weaknesses are they, not even honest craftsmen. And not only do they thus mutilate portraits, but with their Chinese white and Indian ink will they, with all the confidence of the uneducated, touch up a landscape or a face with no model before them. Of tonality of course they never heard, and Nature they never knew. It was once our lot to judge the pictures at a Cambridge photographic exhibition, and we were not a little staggered by the audacity with which one noted “London firm” had touched up and worked upon an opal enlargement of Niagara Falls. The picture was very true and beautiful before those vandals had got hold of it, but, great Cæsar! what a sight it was afterwards, with its impasto of Chinese white, and its shiny gum polished, India ink deepened shadows! In short, a more meretricious production it has seldom been our lot to inspect, and this thing was exhibited by an University undergraduate! If such is the taste of an educated man, what can one expect from the rest of the world! Let, then, the student avoid all these meretricious productions as he would all vulgarities, such as eating his peas with his knife. No first-rate artist will allow his prints to be retouched; he would never be able to bear the look of them afterwards. That the idea of retouching springs from a wrong theory is evident, the improper use of lenses gave false drawing, and people were in artistically and sharply photographed, so that wrinkles, warts, freckles, and even the pores of the skin showed, and then arose the demand for a retoucher to correct all that, and one error led to another, although, without doubt, the false work of a retoucher is much truer than the false work of an uneducated operator. Certainly people do not see, at the distance a photograph is taken from, the wrinkles, spots, and other small blemishes, and they are too uneducated to see the falseness of tone which retouching engenders. Of all the photographers who talk glibly of art, we warrant scarcely one is able to distinguish between a bust carved by a stone-mason, one carved by a mediocre sculptor, and one carved by a master, in fact we have proved this, and yet they talk, talk, write, and lecture on art; while to an artist the difference between each of those three busts is as great as the difference between a mountain, a hillock, and a marsh. The public see the warts and spots and call them false, the greater falsity of tone and retouching they cannot distinguish. An etcher once remarked to us, “How is it photographers seem to do everything to make photographs anything but photographs?” And such is the case; the matchless beauty of a pure and artistic photograph does not satisfy their vulgar minds, and yet such is the only kind of photograph at which artists will look.

Artists on retouching.

It is now fifty years since Daguerre publicly announced Niepce’s discoveries, and on the scientific and industrial side, photography has results to show nothing short of marvellous, but what has it to show on the artistic side? Of the thousands who have practised photography since 1839, and who are now dead, how many names stand out as having done work of any artistic value? Only three. One a master, who was at the same time a sculptor, namely, Adam Salomon; one a trained painter, but without first-rate artistic ability, Rejlander; and one, an amateur,—Mrs. Cameron. Beside these three there is no name among the numerous dead photographers worth a mention. And have matters improved? Well may it be asked by those who have the good of photography at heart, whether it will always be thus. We hope not; but if it is to be otherwise, some radical change must be made, and the blind no longer lead the blind. We have said, then, that of all the thousands of craftsmen who have practised photography and are dead, three names only stand out as having produced works to which we can apply the title artistic. Now let us see what those three have to say to the matter of retouching.

Adam Salomon.

Mr. Adam Salomon, though he strengthened certain parts of his negatives by artificial means, which in the hands of an accomplished artist like himself, was admissible, condemned retouching altogether. He says, “Eschewing retouching with brush or pencil on the film, risking the further deterioration of the negative, I make light finish the task it has, from want of time, or bad quality, insufficiently done, and in such a manner that no hand can hope to rival its delicacy and precision, and this is the only plan that a lover of his calling can justifiably pursue.” So we see that a highly-trained sculptor, like Adam Salomon, dared not retouch, but only sunned down violent contrasts at first, and then printed in all the picture, so that it could not be detected; yet Adam Salomon, in our opinion, could have quite legitimately worked on his negatives, being as he was a highly-trained artist.

Rejlander.

Rejlander, not being a painter of great ability, but having a painter’s training, tried all methods until he arrived at the legitimate scope of photography, then he came to the conclusion that retouching was inadmissible, and it must be remembered that Rejlander was more capable of retouching truthfully than any retoucher has been since, and yet he says, “I think the practice of retouching the negative a sad thing for photography. It is impossible, for even very capable artists, to rival or improve the delicate, almost mysterious gradations of the photograph. Magnify the photographic rendering of, say, the human eye, with a strong lens, and it is found to be almost startling in its marvellous truth. Magnify the retouched image, and it will look like coarse deformity. It ceases to be true. I have sometimes seen a touched photograph which looked very nice, but it possessed no interest for me; I knew it could not be trusted. I have been charged with sophisticating photographs because I combined and masked and sunned prints. But there is a great distinction between suppressing and adding; I never added. I stopped-out portions of the negatives which I did not require to form my picture; I sunned down that which was obtrusive, and where one negative would not serve, I used two or more, joining them with at much truth as I could. But I never attempted to improve negatives. I never believed that I could draw better or more truly than Nature. I consider a touched photograph spoiled for every purpose.” This, then, was Rejlander’s verdict, and though from this we gather he had not yet thrown off the fallacy of combination-printing, yet he subsequently abjured that also. Even when he did use combination-printing, he practised it in a manner never equalled by his imitators, for like all imitators they have copied the bad qualities and left all the genius behind.

Mrs. J. Cameron.

Mrs. Cameron, the last and least of the three, had knowledge and feeling enough also to eschew retouching, none of her work is retouched, just as she had knowledge enough to use a rapid rectilinear lens, although working in the wet-collodion days, for she evidently saw what escaped so many other workers, that the drawing was truer with that lens than with the quicker portrait lenses.