20 Photography as a Fine Art. 



facts of nature into the technical language of art. The painter 

 can make no real imitation of the light which streams from the 

 sun or the artificial fire, and his scale of light, shade, and 

 colour is not only much lower, but in many respects different 

 from that of nature. Only to a slight extent and under favour- 

 able circumstances can he, with any success, make the slightest 

 attempt to imitate the strength of white light as seen in nature, 

 and the art of the colourist is shown in his power of transposing 

 what nature has composed in keys of actual light into corre- 

 sponding, but not resembling, keys, such as his pigments enable 

 him to provide. 



The eye, as a living organism, does not remain in one and 

 the same condition during any considerable portion of time in 

 which an object is contemplated. Thus, if an object consists of 

 parts in different planes, rapid focussing changes will occur in 

 the eye, and the impression of vision is not the simple result of 

 any one of these focussings, but a sort of average resulting from 

 all. The perception of colour is not a simple affair. According to 

 original sensitiveness and cultivation, the sensation of a colour 

 is followed by another sensation of its complementary hue, and 

 when two or more colours are simultaneously presented to the 

 eye, very slight differences in the direction of that organ, and 

 in the attention which the mind pays to its indications deter- 

 mine the precise result that is produced. The brightness of 

 natural objects seen in full lights not being imitable by the 

 artist, it follows that his productions cannot have the same 

 power of summoning up complementary tints. Again, natural 

 objects are more or less in motion, and more or less affected by 

 motions of light and shade upon them, and the artist has to 

 select and stereotype one out of many successive appearances 

 presented to his view. 



A few considerations of this kind will show how soon the 

 limits of realistic imitation are reached, and it must also be 

 remembered tbat even if accurate imitation were possible, it 

 would not satisfy the human mind, which demands imagination, 

 sentiment, emotion, as well as beauty in works of art. But it 

 is generally supposed tbat photography comes to us with some- 

 thing like a perfection, of imitative capacity. This is not the 

 case. Instead of photography being necessarily right, imita- 

 tively considered, it is necessarily wrong. In the first place 

 its focussing is a compromise, and if we take one of the best 

 specimens of photographic landscape, its treatment of fore- 

 ground, middle distance, background and greater distance, will 

 never be found conformable either to nature, or to the impres- 

 sions which, through the eye, the scene depicted makes upon 

 the mind. In nature yellow light is the next in point of bright- 

 ness to white light. Photographic machinery turns it into black. 



