financial end of it.

For the worker to get the real enthusiasm and benefit from photography,
the thing now necessary to mark a distinct note of progress, or to make an
outstanding year, is to have a great international exhibition, similar to
the one held in Buffalo in 1910. This, I am glad to say, is already
planned for next year, to be held in New York City, which, although the
great center of activity, has never had an exhibition of this kind.

ON IDEAS

_By _HEYWORTH CAMPBELL

Thackeray resigned the editorship of a British periodical only because he
could not endure the ordeal of rejecting the thousands of submitted
manuscripts. This is a distressing phase of an Art Director's duties and
to my mind his most sacred obligation. No matter how hardened by
experience, a conscientious editor cannot fail to suffer for and with the
unhappy authors and artists whose work goes back with the proverbial pink
rejection slip. Why are drawings and photographs rejected? What is wrong
with the great mass of rejected material? My observation is that they
suffer more from a lack of clear thinking and careful execution than from
a paucity of ideas.

The weird conceptions and grotesque ideas in back of most of the
unsolicited material submitted would make one easily believe that the
artists are inmates, or perfectly qualified to be inmates of asylums. I
am seldom inclined or required to urge an artist to seek originality of
idea. My constant plea, and what to my mind is a prerequisite, is an
optimistic point of view, a sound, intelligent thought rendered with, may
I say, reverence.

Struggling young artists are constantly advised to cultivate their
imagination. What is imagination? Arthur Brisbane defined this in the
most compact, tangible statement: "Imagination is nothing more than the
power to see and realize what others fail to see and realize." The
illusive idea that we are searching for is nothing hidden or mystic but
right before our very eyes. We have only to "see and realize."

It is conceded, I am sure, that the idea is the prime requisite of a
political cartoon. A prominent cartoonist was once asked where he got his
ideas. In reply he asked "what ideas?" Men of ideas have brains that
function exactly as those of other normal well-ordered citizens. They are
not gifted by strange kinks in their brain cells. When the prominent
cartoonist is contemplating the banal act of shaving or putting in a