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