e
ourselves responsible for. It must be remembered you know, that there
has been a war, and art is in a condition of encouraging and
stimulating renascence, and we may even go so far as to say that it is
a greater world issue than it was previous to the great catastrophe.
And also, it must be heralded that as far as art is concerned the end
of the world has been seen. The true artist, if he is intelligent, is
witness of this most stimulating truth that confronts us. We cannot
hope to function esthetically as we did before all this happened,
because we are not the same beings intellectually. This does not mean
in relation to photography that all straight photography is good. It
merely means that the kind of photography I must name "Fifth Avenue"
art, is a conspicuous species of artistic bunkum, and must be
recognized as such.

Photographers must know that fogging and blurring the image is
curtailing the experience of it. It is a foolish notion that
mystification is of any value. Flattery is one of the false elements
that enter into the making of a work of art among the artists of
doubtful integrity, but this is often if not always the commercial
element that enters into it. There is a vast difference between this
sort of representation and that which is to be found in Greek
sculpture which is nothing short of conscious plastic organization.
These figures were set up in terms of the prevailing systems of
proportion. Portraits were likewise "arranged" through the artistry of
the painter in matters of decoration for the great halls of the
periods in which they were hung. They were studies on a large scale of
ornamentation. Their beauty lies chiefly in the gift of execution. In
these modern photographs of Stieglitz and his followers there is an
engaging directness which cannot be and must not be ignored. They do
for once give in the case of the portraits, and I mean chiefly of
course the Stieglitz portraits, the actuality of the sitter without
pose or theatricism of any sort, a rather rare thing to be said of the
modern photograph.

Stieglitz, therefore, despite his thirty or more years of
experimentation comes up among the moderns by virtue of his own
personal attitude toward photography, and toward his, as well as its,
relation to the subject. His creative power lies in his ability to
diagnose the character and quality of the sitter as being peculiar to
itself, as a being in relation to itself seen by his own clarifying