At the present day, whether they be prepared to admit their descent from a common stock with the ape or not, few thinking persons will be found to deny that evolution is at work in many fields other than the domain of natural history.
It will be my endeavor in this article to trace its action, and the actions of variation and of selection in photography.
In using the word evolution in this connection, it must be remembered that, though analogous to its meaning in natural history, it is not synonymous with it. In nature a new species is derived, on the Darwinian theory, by lineal descent from preceding species — that is to say, all existing beings are the progeny of some of those that existed before them. To say that the dry plate is the progeny of the wet plate would be farfetched; but it is its successor and became so through being a variation of the photographic plate, which, in the struggle for existence, beat its rival and predecessor.
In the beginning, photography was claimed by art, chemistry, and optics; though doubtless to chemistry and manipulative skill fell the major portion of the credit. The object of everybody was to record. That many pictures and good pictures, were produced by those possessing artistic faculties was necessarily the case. The work of Hill in 1843 – 1845, for instance, is of high artistic value.
There was, in those days, one species of photograph with a number of slight varieties, in the same way that in the prime of Greece, painting and sculpture were but varieties of one art, differing in their materials (as daguerreotype and calotype did from one another), but essentially one art insofar as ideals and objects were concerned. Sculpture and painting are nowadays widely differing arts, not different varieties, not different species, but different orders of art. Painting itself is split up into many genera — oil – and watercolor, not to speak of pastel or tempera, while whole families of kindred arts have risen and worked themselves into the position of separate arts with separate aims and methods; I speak of pencil-drawing and crayon; etching, mezzotint, and engraving; woodcut; lithography, etc., etc.
In the same way photography, from being a single art-science, has ramified into a growth of many kindred branches. Already the aims and methods of "process" itself is subdivided into intaglio, typographic, and collographic methods; each, however, as a rule, with the same mental ¹ objective in view, namely, the production of a more or less exact facsimile, through by different mechanical methods. Leaving out of our purview color-photography, which is still in a rather primitive state (though also a well-marked species), we come to photography proper. Here we have a large number of different processes (mechanical methods) used for many different (mental) purposes.
Whereas in the "process" group the mechanical methods are the chief difference, in the other group the mental differences are perhaps the more important.
These differences of object (which I have called mental differences) class themselves naturally into two groups with a thhird intermediate between them: I. Educational and scientific; such as astronomical, archaeological, and natural-history photographs. II. Personal and topographical; a subgroup, in which we may include all that photography primitively meant — that is, the recording of a portrait or place which is of personal interest, for the purpose of possessing a memento or likeness when the original is not before us. III. Pictorial or artistic; in which the object is to obtain a result of intrinsic beauty without reference to its scientific value or to our knowing or not knowing the place or person represented.
These three groups (and especially the first and third), as a whole, are very distinct in their aims and objects, though many photographs will partake of the nature of more than one group. Roughly speaking, the objects of photography of the first group are the highest attainable accuracy and truth to fact; in many cases the minutest details, whether seen by the eye in the original subject or not, are invaluable, and the influence of the personal equation on the result must be reduced to a minimum.
In the third group the ideal is totally different, if not contrary, to that of the first. Here we wish to stimulate the esthetic sensations of the beholder. Truth to fact is not wanted, though to a certain extent truth to appearance is. ² The influence of the personal equation is given as full play as possible.
The second group lies midway between the other two; generally partaking of the nature of a record, with the first group, and of something pleasing to the eye with the third.
It is in photographs of the third group that readers of Camera Work are chiefly interested, and in such of the second as overlap the third. I will, therefore, dismiss the first group briefly by saying that in general its objects and methods are dictated pretty rigidly by the particular science which calls photography to its aid, and that the more the operations approximate those of a machine the better, as a rule: e. g., star-mapping, sunshine-recording, spectrography, etc.
With the third group the contrary is the case; although, because of the common genesis of all the groups, this fact is hardly realized, with the result that artistic photography is sometimes criticized because it does not fulfill the conditions of scientific photography. It need not and should not be. The latter appeals to the intellect, the former to the imagination; the latter asks for exact facts, the former for pleasing suggestions.
What I particularly wish to point out in this article is that these differences between the various "species" of photography will tend in the natural course of evolution to become ever more marked, and that a photograph which attempts to combine at the same time the scientific accuracy of group I with the esthetic beauty of group III will lead — as in nature — to a steril hybrid partaking of some of the qualities of both. For instance, in treating a natural-history subject, although we may (and should) make it as pleasing to the eye as possible, we must not thereby sacrifice any of the educational value; to do so would be to produce neither fish, flesh, fowl, nor good herring.
The same line of reasoning will show that, in the natural course of events, each variety of method will work itself out separately, and that the technique and the effects aimed at and produced will vary with the genius of the methods. This separation of ideals and treatment is seen clearly in, say, etching and engraving or woodcut. In photography we have come to the parting lines, but we are only at the initial stage. Already the effects sought after in bromide, platinum, and gum-bichromate are different, and with the specialization of each medium they will become more so.
In a bromide (as at present worked) a brush-mark would look out of place; in a gum, brush-marks are quite allowable. In the former they are an alien element, in the latter they are part of the process. As photography expands these differences will become more and more marked, and both mental ideal and mechanical methods more and more differentiated, for that is the universal law of evolution as we see it all around us. That some of the branches will lead nowhere—that is, will not survive the struggle for life—is also a foregone conclusion; but as long as photography does not limit itself to one line of progress, this will not affect its advance, for the fittest will survive. It is for t his reason that it seems unwise to lay down canons as to the lines on which photography ought to advance. We are in the early days of photographic art-evolution as yet, and though artificial selection may be useful, its use depends entirely on the wisdom of those who select, and they cannot, in the nature of things, wee very far into the future. ³ It is safer to let natural selection do its work, perhaps a little more slowly but more surely in the end, than to meddle in problems whose ultimate outcome we cannot grasp; in seeking to root out the bad, we stunt and destroy what might, if left alone, be the beginning of a useful and valuable departure.