One may scarcely call an estimate in art matters complete without an opinion from Mr. Ruskin. “In art we look for a record of man’s thought and power, but photography gives that only in quite a secondary degree. Every touch of a great painting is instinct with feeling, but howsoever carefully the objects of a picture be chosen and grouped by the photographer, there his interference ends. It is not a mere matter of color or no color, but of Invention and Design, of Feeling and Imagination. Photography is a matter of ingenuity: Art of genius.”
On these lines however the philosopher of Coniston hardly proves his case.
Invention and design, feeling and imagination, are all a part of the photographer’s suite. He employs them all. And these too are qualities the most artistic. Technique, which is manual and not spiritual, is the one point at which art and photography cannot coalesce. To Art’s sentient finger-tips, Photography holds up only steel, wood and glass. Art therefore holds the winning cards.
P. G. Hamerton, England’s safest and surest critic of art, writing a generation ago on the “Relation between Photography and Painting,” says: “But all good painting, however literal, however pre-Raphaelite or topographic, is full of human feeling and emotion. If it has no other feeling in it than love or admiration for the place depicted, that is much already, quite enough to carry the picture out of the range of photography into the regions of real art.”
“And this is the reason why good painting cannot be based on photography. I find photographic data of less value than hasty sketches. The photograph renders the form truly, no doubt, as far as it goes, but it by no means renders feelings and is therefore of no practical use (save for reference) to a painter who feels habitually and never works, without emotion.”
It is very much to be questioned if Mr. Hamerton in the face of what has since been done with the camera by men who _feel_ and are led by the emotional in art, would claim a distinction to the painter and deny that the photographic product was unaffected by the emotional temperament.
A friend shows us a group of his pets, either dogs, horses or children, done by an “artist photographer.” We find it strongly composed, evincing a clear knowledge of every point to be observed in extracting from the subject all the picturesqueness there was in it. We notice a soft painter-like touch, shadows not detailed—simply graded—aerial envelopment everywhere suggested.