persons.
All this was, of course, in keeping with the theatricism of the period
in which it was produced, which is one of the best things to be said
of it. But we do know that Whistler helped ruin photography along
with Wilde who helped ruin esthetics. Everyone has his office
nevertheless. As a consequence, Alfred Stieglitz was told by the
prevailing geniuses of that time that he was a back number because of
his strict adherence to the scientific nature of the medium, because
he didn't manipulate his plate beyond the strictly technical
advantages it offered, and it was not therefore a fashionable addition
to the kind of thing that was being done by the assuming ones at that
time. The exhibition of the life-work of Alfred Stieglitz in March,
1921, at the Anderson Galleries, New York, was a huge revelation even
to those of us who along with our own ultra modern interests had found
a place for good unadulterated photography in the scheme of our
appreciation of the art production of this time.

I can say without a qualm that photography has always been a real
stimulus to me in all the years I have been personally associated with
it through the various exhibitions held along with those of modern
painting at the gallery of the Photo-Secession, or more intimately
understood as "291". Photography was an interesting foil to the kind
of veracity that painting is supposed to express, or rather to say,
was then supposed to express; for painting like all other ideas has
changed vastly in the last ten years, and even very much since the
interval created by the war. I might have learned this anywhere else,
but I did get it from the Stieglitz camera realizations with more
than perhaps the expected frequency, and I am willing to assert now
that there are no portraits in existence, not in all the history of
portrait realization either by the camera or in painting, which so
definitely present, and in many instances with an almost haunting
clairvoyance, the actualities existing in the sitter's mind and body
and soul. These portraits are for me without parallel therefore in
this particular. And I make bold with another assertion, that from our
modern point of view the Stieglitz photographs are undeniable works of
art, as are also the fine photographs of the younger men like Charles
Sheeler and Paul Strand. Sheeler, being also one of our best modern
painters, has probably added to his photographic work a different type
of sensibility by re