Editorial Notes

HE ART EDITOR of the New York Evening Post, speaking of an exhibition of landscapes, by E. J. Steichen, the painter and photographer, which was recently held in New York City, refers in most complimentary terms to the paintings in the coilection. In the room beside the paintings were hung about thirty of Mr. Steichen's photographs. He has always professed to take the two arts with equal seriousness, as the writer of this review asserts, but he points to the fact that most of the photographs are familiar, as an indication that painting may be winning him away from photography. His photographs are most skilfully contrived" (the italics are ours) writes this reviewer, "but they share the quality of the new camera work of looking better than they really are, with the defect of never again looking quite as good as they did on first acquaintance."

This is a significant criticism on work of this kind and is fully justified by the facts. It is true that the prints of this school of photography are very often described more accurately by the word "contrived" than by any other, and it is only too true that most of the exponents of the "Secession" movement, as it has been called, are doing little or nothing that is new. They exhibit the same things over and over again, which would suggest a lack of originality and creative power, both fundamental characteristics of real artistic temperament. These facts were noted by all who saw the great international exhibition of photographs at Dresden, Germany, last summer. It is the new and, as yet, comparatively unknown photographic workers, who are doing the best things now, and the new things; they are really the progressives and the leaders.

W

E take pleasure in showing our readers this month, a really charming print by the proofreader of this magazine, Mr. John Downie. Mr. Downie has been a thoughtful and studious photographic worker for many years and is a good example of what we were saying in the foregoing note. Never exhibiting, like many hundred others of his class, he has nevertheless, been quietly perfecting himself in his work, until it ranks very close to the best. The delicate treatment of light in the original photograph, and its truly poetic atmosphere, is unfortunately not very well preserved in the

E

VEN the most ardent members and advocates of the Secession will admit

that some of their early work was bad, and that they were largely responsible for a vast lot of trash submitted for exhibition at many of the Salons and exhibitions of a few years ago. Yet this very bad mess set us all thinking and working-striving to differentiate between the false and the true with the result in a vast improvement in our work, and elevating to a very high standard the work of the American pictorialist.

We heard it remarked recently that the Photo-Secession was no longer an influence in American pictorial photography. Fortunately for the American pictorialist this is far from being the case. Were every member of the Secession to cease making or exhibiting their pictures, the influence of the Secession would remain for years to come. Some of us have not always agreed with the Secession, and some of us have always disagreed with them, but nevertheless they have been since their beginning a decided factor in the uplift of pictorial work. And for this reason; the Secession is composed of a body of educated men and women with minds capable of receiving and retaining a good perception of the artistic, and their work, though sometimes disagreeable, has been better than that of many of their deriders. At all events whether we have agreed with them or not, we have all tried to improve our work, to make it truly artistic, either to produce work equal to theirs when we agreed with them, or to demonstrate that they were wrong when we were anti-Secession.

T is pleasant to read nice things about one's publication in a contemporary periodical. The following note appeared in the photographic column of the London (England) Daily Telegraph, of January seventh, which is edited by the Rev. F. C. Lambert:

"One of the much neglected but very important parts of the photographer's education is the study of foreign pictorial photography and foreign technical journals. I am forcefully reminded of this by an inspection of the December issue of the Photographic Times. This contains, among many excellent articles, one of the best, if not quite the best, magazine collections of night photographs that I have seen, by J. F. Strauss, Paul Fournier, Van der Weyde, W. H. Whitehead, Alfred Stieglitz, and letterpress by Sadakichi Hartmann. Another noteworthy contribution is an illustrated letter by the editor (W. I. Lincoln Adams), which teaches us English folk the folly of rushing about the Continent in search of the beautiful while we have it in abundance in our own much neglected Lake District. An illustrated article on Figure Composition by Sidney Allan contains many good hints. In a word, I would strongly advise my readers to take an opportunity of looking through the noteworthy number, which reflects no little credit on all concerned in its production."

OST of us have hitherto tacitly assumed that the slower the speed of the plate the finer its grain, and the finer its grain the better it will render fine detail. It now appears from recent investigations by Dr. Mees that the second part of this assumption is not correct. His researches seem to show that a plate of medium size of grain will better render fine detail than will a plate of very fine grain. Why this is so is not immediately apparent. But pending further light on this subject those interested in photo-microscopy may well take heed of this view. Moreover the wave length of light has to be taken into account. Thus with an ordinary fine-grain plate two lines .018 m.m., or, say roughly, 1/1300 inch apart, can be separated, but with a fine-grain plate and red light the separation will run down to .008 mm., or, say, 1/3000 inch. For further details the reader may be referred to Dr. Mees' paper, recently communicated to the Royal Society of England.

WE

E are glad to announce that the editor-in-chief of this magazine, in compliance with many requests by our readers, is now at work collecting his letters on Photographing in Old England, with a view to publishing them at an early date in book form. He is going over them very carefully for this purpose, adding considerable new matter, and is writing one entirely additional chapter, of a practical nature, consisting of hints and sug

gestions for the photographic tourist abroad. There will be nine letters in the completed book, besides an explanatory preface, and the concluding chapter containing practical instruction referred to above. The book will contain all the illustrations which have appeared, or will appear, in this series of articles, in THE PHOTOGRAPHIC TIMES, beside a number of others which will be especially reproduced for this book. The publication of the work will be duly announced in this and other journals of the photographic press.

W

E NOTICE our esteemed contemporary, the Bulletin of Photography, of Philadelphia, has purchased the St. Louis and Canadian Photographer, of St. Louis, Mo. The latter will be discontinued as a separate publication, but will be joined with and issued under the Bulletin. All subscribers of the St. Louis and Canadian Photographer will receive the Bulletin instead until their subscriptions expire. We wish the consolidation of the two magazines the best success.

T

HAT one must ever be on the alert for the unusual in snapshots is shown by the accompanying picture. At a horse race held in the west, one of the horses stumbled and fell, the other driver being so close and directly in the rear was unable to clear the fallen horse, In the picture the horse at the left is shown trying to regain its feet, the horse at the right has passed over horse and trap and in doing so has thrown his driver over the fence. Mr. J. L. Anderson in securing the picture, was evidently trying for a snapshot of the race and hardly anticipated the result.

Monthly Foreign Digest

TRANSLATED BY HENRY F. RAESS.

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