ties are active
camera clubs, each affiliated with the local art society and each holding
annual exhibitions in the spring of the year, at which workers from all
parts of the country show their pictures. During the war these clubs have
been doing little more than marking time, but now that at last days of
peace have come again, we feel that the future holds prospects of great
promise to us. For one reason or another the men whose names were known
ten or fifteen years ago seem to have dropped out and their places are
being filled by new blood, men with high ideals and aspirations, who are
not content merely with reproducing, by means of their cameras, pretty
scenes and places, but who believe that photography is capable of much
more--of showing not only the physical facts, but the very spirit of nature
herself--a true impressionism; and it is the task of these men to place
Maine in the position she should hold in pictorial work.

During the past year much has been accomplished by a very few men, and
through these men Maine has been represented at all the largest and best
salons, not only in this country and Canada, but also in England at the
London Salon. Prints by the multiple gum process are favored by some of
the Portland workers, but the use of this process as a medium of
expression is limited to a few men, and the most of the large prints
produced are enlargements on bromide paper, as is probably the case
generally throughout the country. This is perhaps somewhat to be
regretted, for although bromide paper is capable of producing very fine
prints when the subject is exactly adapted to it, still it does not permit
of the personal control afforded by some of the other processes, and of
course this is a handicap to the pictorial worker.

As before stated, the pictorial output of the State during the past year
has been limited to the work of a few men, but this condition is not going
to continue for long. The clubs and societies are bending every effort
toward the encouragement of the new workers, and already some very
creditable work has been produced, and the coming year should see a worthy
showing from Maine at all the salons.

*

PICTORIAL PHOTOGRAPHY IN MASSACHUSETTS

_By_ DWIGHT A. DAVIS

In Massachusetts, as in other parts of the country, war-time activities
interfered to a noticeable extent with the cause of pictorial photography.
The interference