A Search for Beauty

From the moment it was invented, pho­tography was accepted by most people for what it is an unparalleled recording medium. But some photographers soon realized that if it were to win a place among the arts, its images had to go beyond mere record keeping-that photographs had to be beautiful and expressive in themselves.

In the beginning there were no rules for this new art form, no established body of artists or traditions to say what it should do. Inevitably many photogra­phers relied heavily on what was going on in painting or sculpture at the time. This often led to amusing-even disas­trous-results. In a few cases it produced remarkably good pictures. One example, from the' so­called "pictorial" school of photogra­phy popular around the turn of the cen­tury, is the lovely study of a girl shown opposite, made by the American pho­tographer Gertrude Kasebler in 1903. Its romantic pose, soft focus and moody lighting are remarkably similar to many paintings then in vogue.

But even such graceful attempts to parallel painting slighted the special power of the camera. Photographers began to recognize their medium as a virtually limitless means of showing others the world the way they saw it. Photography, they found, could evoke the serenity of lakes and clouds or the rushing, hemmed-in quality of the city. It could celebrate sensuous natu ral forms in the female figure or even in a common vegetable; it could express people's personalities more convinc­ingly by framing them in bold compo­sitions of line and tone; it could isolate details in subjects as commonplace as a church or a rock and turn them into a~stract works of art. And finally, they discovered, photographs could be used to fracture the world of reality and re­assemble it, employing all the tricks of the darkroom to create a reality that ex­ists only In the artist's mind.

                                               GERTRUDGE KASEBIER : Evelyn Nesbit, 1903