The Elements of a Pictorial Photograph

Photography is becoming so very useful that it is a question whether it will not in time be forgotten that it was originally intended as a means of representing the beautiful...

Photography is becoming so very useful that it is a question whether it will not in time be forgotten that it was originally intended as a means of representing the beautiful, and become known only as being the humble helper in everybody's business except its own, from that of the astronomer, who uses it to discover unsuspected worlds, down to that of the ""brewer and baker and candlestick maker."" It may be said that there is scarcely anything our art cannot accomplish, even to seeing things invisible to ordinary senses and photographing the living bones of which our frames are made. The only impossibility to the art — if we are to believe some art critics who appear to have had little opportunity of observation — is that it can produce art; this little treatise contends that the camera is only a tool in the sense that the brush is a tool, and one capable in the hands of an artist of conveying thought, feeling, expressing individuality, and also of the usual attributes of art in their degree.

From the earliest times photography was intended to produce pictorial results. The first photographers devoted all their attention to making pictures, and there has always been a few who have endeavoured to keep the sacred lamp of art alight, but the adaptability of the processes to every purpose under the sun, has interfered greatly with its fitness for finer issues. Another cause of decadence has been the curious fondness of the public for meretricious untruthfulness, such as mistaking smoothness and polish for beauty, and venerable wrinkles for ugliness. Still another, and perhaps the chief cause, is that there are many men who can understand an obvious fact to one who has a feeling for the sentiment of beauty.

The former find that the hard nuts of science (whether they crack them or only break their own teeth) easily satisfy their aspirations, and at the same time they cannot feel much conviction about a thing they so little understand as art. The efforts, however, of the promoters of the Photographic Salon during the later years, have met with very great success in inducing photographers and the public to take a more serious view of  the art.

This is not intended to be so much serious treatise on art, as a book of hints and suggestions supplementing, but distinct from, a former volume —Pictorial Effect in Photography I want to help the amateur to recognise that there is much more in the art than the taking of a simple photograph, that its materials are only second in plasticity to those of the painter and draughtsman, and that if they are more  difficult to manage, there are effects to which they are even more adapted than any other means of art. Much of the volume will be found useful for suggesting subjects which are possible to those means.