Camera Craft ~ 1934 ~ Responses to Venus And Vulcan and William Mortensen

Following the "Venus and Vulcan" articles published in Camera Craft written by William Mortensen that examined various approaches to photography, Group F 64 appears to have taken great offense.  Two letters were published that same year, 1934.

My experience of the history of photography in California is that Group F 64 "won" the war of "purism" and "realism" over "pictorialism".  Ed Weston, Ansel Adams, Imogen Cunningham went on to lead successful careers. William Mortensen was resigned to be backwaters of photography history.

Yet, in so many ways, it was William Mortensen who helped democratize photography and made it accessible to Americans.  He taught and wrote about skills and techniques used in photography years before St. Ansel published his now famous series (including The Negative, The Print, etc).  Specifically, William Mortensen described a system of exposure and film development that led directly to the Zone System.  This was much to the horror of St. Ansel, who felt he'd made something entirely new, had written books on the subject, only to learn later though a professor he'd taught with about who had actually given rise to the concept.

Before St. Ansel was crowned King of West Coast Photography my family belonged to a little camera club in San Juan Capistrano.  It was run by a photographer who'd been injured by an Indy car that'd lanced into the track-side photographers area where he was photographing an Indy 500.  We learned about Weston, Adams, and other members of the original Group F 64.  A few of the photographers in the club would go north to Yosemite Valley during the summer to take classes from Adams and his assistants.  They'd come back and tell stories about how much fun they'd had, how their photography was vastly improved, and such and that.  Those of us who couldn't afford to take classes were impressed.

Much closer to home, I grew up not far from Laguna Beach.  This is where the Last Great Pictorialist, William Mortensen, lived and worked.  The appellation I just give Mortensen is, of course, not strictly true.  There are, even today, perfectly capable Pictorialist practioners.  But I put things this way because of my own history of the place and time.  I knew nothing of man even though he was situated very close to were I, too, lived.  It feels all to much like a "missed opportunity."

It's interesting to me to read these raw first person histories.  They're not always kind, these materials.  What is striking is there's so much passion for the subject, even as I've just recently learned through a friend this passion was deliberately fueled as to stoke the fires of commercialism.  Create controversy.  Sell more books.  Lather.  Rinse.  Repeat.  

I don't mean this to minimize William Mortensen's words.  Instead, I feel what he wrote nearly 100 years ago stands true and clear in spite of any underlying commercial motivation.  He roundly angered Group F 64 in the process, that's for certain.  How did members of Group F 64 respond to the following?

"...  The whole program of the purists inclines to overlook the basic truth that the final concern of art is not with facts, but with ideas and emotions..." ~ William Mortensen, Camera Craft, 1934

Let's have a look, shall we? 

 

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Correspondence April 1934 ~

Dear Sir:

The article by William Mortensen in the February issue of Camera Craft interests me very much indeed.  In a very engaging manner he has presented a point of view which paves an excellent path for discussion.  As a member of GroupF64 I feel obliged to answer certain points of opinion which M. Morensen holds about us.  I say "about us" - I really mean about the contemporary tendency which I feel we reflect rather than motivate.  It is true that Group F64 has strenuously held to its program and ideals and has, in its short existence, produced a good deal of work.  But the work of the Group is no self-assertive of Perfetion and the Ultimate.  We are experimenters who are investigation, as it were, the possibilities of the pure photographic medium.  We have no base our work on the photographic precedents alone; we are attempting to define photography as a fine art, and we embrace the motives and accomplishments of all contemporary art in relation to the thought (and thought-processes) of the times.  We are not imitating the superficial aspects of the other art-forms; we are concerned with the essential logic of art.  All art is really the expression of the same thing, and we are attempting to define the particular manner and mode of the pure photographic expression.  The "Pictorialist" has acknowledged the other arts only in the imitative sense (superficially) and has neglected to remember photography in his production.

All the members of the Group F.64 are independent - and all are quite different in their essential work.  The Group membership is open to anyone who comes forward with original work well done and true to the medium in the opinion of all the the Group.  Regarding the name of the Group - F.64: let me offer a short history of it.  For several years I had entertained the idea of forming a small group of workers in the modern idiom; finally, with the enthusiastic aid of Willard Van Dyke, the Group was organized.  It was very difficult to find a suitable name - many suggestions were made but rejected on account of inadequacy, duplication, etc.  They Willard Van Dyke suffered a stroke of genius and thought of "F 64."  The Group immediately accepted the name.  Not only have we not disowned it - we chose it enthusiastically.  The name suggests precision and accuracy, and it does not men that we use only F64!

Mr. Mortensen's term "Meta-realism" is a very good term, but I do not think he has clearly defined what he means. I think that the work of the Germans of which he speaks is developed along the same general direction of the work of Paul Strand, Group F 64, etc., except that it is very unimpressive in technic and is often shallow throughout.

Also, I would like a precise definition of Mr. Mortensen's conception of Taste.

Ansel Adams

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A Purist's Reply to Mr. Mortensen ~ June 8, 1934

Dear Mr. Young:

It is impossible for me to take issue with Mr. Mortensen on the subject of photography, for our definitions of the medium are woo widely divergent to permit a common ground of discussion.  I believe that an artist must express his time and place withing the limitations of his medium; that every medium has its limitations; and that both in his work and in his writing, Mr. Mortensen has disregarded the exigencies of photography.  However his article in your last issue is convincingly written, too convincingly, to let pass certain misconceptions Mr. Mortensen seems to have in regard to the purist, which might be misleading to someone who reads one side of the story only.

Mr. Mortensen says that the work of the purist lacks subjective interest.  Either  he must be unobservant, or he is unfamiliar with the work. Photography is an
objective medium, true enough, but the most objective photograph is capable of
profound subjective reaction arousing a in the mind of the In the in-
spectator.  In the infancy of any medium, there are produced examples which may be considered experimental, and important only as indications of a maturity of expression to come.  Doubtless many of us are guilty of presenting photographs of this type.  However, certain recent tendencies are away from mere pattern making toward photographs rendered in a straight manner, the interpretation of which may be considered definitely subjective.  Furthermore this interpretation would be in the light of our time and our conditions, not in an escape from them into a nebulous past.  Mr. Mortensen has photographed a contemporary American disguised as Cesare Borgia (who after all lived in Renaissance Italy).  Does this have any meaning for a twentieth-century American, or is it merely Mr. Mortensen's attempt to escape the problems with surround him?

Unfortunately, when the question of "staticism" in portraiture is consider, Mr. Mortensen takes Ansel Adams' remarks to represent the attitude of all the workers in the pure manner.  Weston definitely disagrees with this point of view, and I am sure that John Paul Edwards and Imogen Cunningham also do not agree.

As to the subject of equipment: Ansel Adams is engaged in a variety of commercial jobs with necessitate the use of several cameras and lenses.   The fact that he has mastered them is to his credit.  Weston, on the other hand, uses one camera for portraiture and a view camera for all other work.  Most of the men I know who work in pure photography use but one camera.  It is far more usual to find "gadget hounds" among the users of miniature cameras.  So much for the statement that we pay "lip-homage" only, to the doctrine of simplicity.

Mr. Mortensen objects to our complete rendering of detail, and says that our records of actuality are not artistic truth, because art "is things as they are experienced, not things as they are."  The art of the purist is experienced.  The experiencing of an emotional reaction to the subject is the impetus which causes him to make his photograph.  The subject is "seen" however, within the confines of his objective medium, and he proceeds therefore, to make a photograph in a manner which best will convey to the spectator, th truth of the subject which has caused his emotional reaction.  For after all the spectator has nothing from which to react but the photographic print.

The purist is selective, although Mr. Mortensen says that this is not true.  He may select subject material, point of view, film, filter, lens, and printing paper.  Selectivity differentiates the photograph of artistic intent from that of mere fact transcription.  I don not mean to disregard the importance of subject material, for there is no doubt in my mind that the period of technical tours de force is over, and that now, by associative connotations in the mind of the person who sees the print, subject matter must also play its part in the composition.

Yours truly, Willard Van Dyke 

Camera Craft ~ June 1934 ~ Venus And Vulcan William Mortensen An Essay On Creative Pictorialism Fallacies of "Pure Photography"

Image-making today is generally and for the most part rather banal.  Viewers and practitioners alike for whatever reasons are satisfied with this state of affairs.  Images are created and consumed at a hellatious rate.  Billions of little banalities are posted every day across the 'net.  To what end?  For what purpose?

It wasn't always this way.  In fact, "things" used to matter a bit differently back in the day and these things could be sometimes hashed out in public.  Peoples egos were inflated or bruised, depending on the individual sure enough.  "Stuff" happened.  Lives were lived.  Histories recorded.  A few of the participants got famous (and rich).  Others languished into the back of the deepest caves of photographic history. 

The following William Mortensen Camera Craft article from 1934 is particularly interesting in this regard.  It's interesting to me he was so often denigrated and not celebrated.  Ansel Adams later wrote he wished Mortensen dead.  Could this specific article be related to that desire?

 

 

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Venus and Vulcan ~ William Mortensen
An Essay on Creative Pictorialism 
4. Fallacies of "Pure Photography"

There have always been purists in art just as there have been puritans in morals. Purists and puritans alike have been marked by a crusading devotion to self-defined fundamentals, by a tendency to sweeping condemnation of all who over-step the boundaries they have set up, and by grim disapproval of the more pleasing and graceful
things in life. Both of them, in their enthusiastic zeal for putting down gross abuses, are prone, in Savonarola fashion, to throw everything onto the fire. So, instead of merely fulfilling their salutary function of clearing out rubbish and getting down to basic principles, they have set themselves perversely in the way of further progress.

 In the field of photography there had long been many sins committed with the aid of a camera that cried out for correction. The snap-shooter was busy giving perpetuity to banalities. The photo-artist of the Fuzzy-Wuzzy school was, with the aid of diffusion lenses, expressing himself in terms of cotton wool. An aimless dilettantism marked the efforts of the average amateur, and a bare-faced ignorance of technical fundamentals marked the efforts of many a one who called himself a professional. And finally there was an emphasis on the quick and easy, cheap and nasty commercial aspects of photography.

Here, surely, was opportunity for the reformer and his torch and a rousing 'bonfire of vanities". Such a reformation movement was forth-coming in the work of the so-called purists. Rationalizing their prejudicesinto a definition of the aim of photography, they found it to consist in an objective rendering of fact free from any "conceptions reminiscent of other mediums". Manipulation or retouching of negatives or prints they
shunned as the plague. They stressed the need of simplicity and sincerity, and the vital importance of solid technical knowledge.  Their work is uniformly hard and brittle, shows technical competence, and consistently avoids any subjective interest. And after the perennial fashion of reformers, they have duly erected their reforms into a code, and have chosen to regard a good clean contact print as the end of photography rather than as its indispensible beginning.

In earlier articles of this series I have endeavored to outline somewhat the positions of the Realistic (or purist) and the Non-realist (or Creative) groups in photography. In the present article I intend to examine critically the major tenets of the Realists, with the view of pointing out some of the fallacies that, it seems to me, infect their thinking.
In so doing, I, for the most part, omit from consideration the crowning fallacy of all
a would-be art that is unselective; for this aspect of the — matter was largely covered in the last chapter.

The Realists have laid great emphasis on the purity- of "pure photography", unpolluted by any of the methods, mannerisms, or qualities of the graphic arts of painting, drawing, etching, etc. "Purity" is conceived to consist in limiting photographic expression to the mechanically objective representation that is inherent in the uncontrolled camera, and in limiting processes to the simplest and most primitive type. Thus the photo-chemical process, seizing its tail in its mouth, finds its realization in itself. Purity in art is an ancient topic for argument. In the fifth century before Christ, Euripides was sharply taken to task for bringing human problems into his plays and thus debasing the severe purity of the dramatic form. Shakespeare, in Voltaire's opinion, was a talented barbarian who understood nothing of the niceties of play-writing. Beethoven and Wagner were both charged with violating the purity of their medium Beethoven by bringing a philosophic element into his music, Wagner by developing his music on dramatic lines. However, it seems exceedingly doubtful that purity in art is either possible or desirable. Imagination is a wayward and wilful wench, and when she is on the loose she is not to be held in check by any arbitrary boundaries that divide one medium from another. The best work in any medium often contains "conceptions reminiscent of other mediums". Michael Angelo, the sculptor, brought sculptural qualities to his painting. Rembrandt was a master of both painting and etching, and used the two mediums to obtain similar effects. The quality of Beethoven was unchanged, whether he wrote for piano or symphony orchestra.

Photography as a technique and an art is very young, much too young for any one to say just what is "photographic". So, even if it were desirable, it would be an exceedingly presumptious act to fence in a narrow tract and label it "pure photography". Regarded merely as a means of objective representation, photography is a shallow medium
possessing neither breadth nor emphasis. To confine oneself to this aspect of  photography is to be guided by the weakness rather than the strength of the medium.

In many cases the finely enunciated precepts of the Realists are contradicted
by their own practice, oftentimes because these precepts are impossible of realization under the limitations which they have laid upon themselves. "Honesty and sincerity", for example, which the Realists mention as being among their aims, are certainly worthy objectives, and are certainly essential qualities of great art; but honesty and sincerity
are not to be achieved by mere repetition of superficial facts. It may be a fact (let us say) that Mary Jones has a pimple on her nose; but to portray the pimple in all its effulgence would be neither honest nor sincere, for to do so would imply that the pimple was as important as Mary, and even might be regarded as suggesting that Mary partook of the annoying nature of her blemish. For reasons that I will discuss when I come to the matter of texture, faithful representation of surfaces often vitiates or even contradicts the essential character of the subject.

 "Staticism" 'in portraiture is another quality sought by the Realists.  By this expression they mean photographing a head or figure in objective terms as if it were a piece of sculpture. Given appropriate subject matter, such impersonal handling may be very impressive; but here again the Realists are betrayed by their unselective and literal rendering of details. Accidental, temporary things thrust themselves into the attention. A wisp of hair out of place, a skin imperfection, an assertive pattern in the dress and the desired static, sculptured quality breaks down into a mere conglomerate of detail.

"Simplicity" is another excellent standard which the Realists have set themselves - simplicity in equipment and rendering.  Unquestionably such simplicity characteristizes the best in art. But, with the Realists, simplicity in rendering is often lost through their passion for irrelevant detail. As to simplicity in equipment this seems to be an ideal to which they pay lip-homage only. In a recently published exposition of purist technique and methods, the author lists in his simplified equipment three cameras and six lenses. Three very similar portraits are shown as the product of two cameras and three lenses. Simplicity of equipment is of value only because it enables one to be master of his tools and concentrated on the sole end of photography the making of pictures. To thoroughly master three cameras and six lenses in all their permutations would require a considerably longer life-span than Providence has allotted to photographers. An imperfectly mastered tool is largely master of its user.  So great is the technical obsession revealed by some of the purists home that it seems not illogical to suggest that they keep their prints at and send their cameras to the salons.

A further curious conflict of principle and practice appears in the Realist's identification of tone with emotional characteristics.  That tone has such emotional qualities I do not deny: but how came such an untamed maverick as emotion to stray into the chaste pastures of the purists? Emotion is a subjective quality, and is strange, not to say danger-
ous, company for "pure objectivity". Emotion is a very unruly critter, and is likely to play hell with the purist china-shop. Indeed, there is evidence that the destructive work has already begun; for the exposition of Realist technique to which I have already alluded refers to tone as something admitting of control. This is, of course, a fatal concession, and
gives the whole show away. For if an objective "record of reality" is the aim, then a "photometrically accurate presentation" is the only possible presentation, no matter how aesthetically distressing it might be. If tone is granted to be subject to control, why not line also, which has equal emotional significance? And if line, why not shapes and forms?
And if shapes and forms, why not allow elision or emphasis of detail?  And if all these things are allowed, what becomes of the "record of actuality"? ...  Sunk without a trace!

 So much for the inherent contradictions of the purist position. More serious are the deviations of the purist tenets from basic art principles.  Especially fallacious is their assumption that artistic truth lies in a complete rendering of literal detail, in a "record of actuality". Truth in art — lies in the rendering of experience or rather in the rendering of things-as-they-are-experienced, not of things-as-they-are. Psychological truth, not scientific accuracy, is the species of veracity with which art is concerned — conformity not to fact, but to the mind's way of apprehending fact.

The mind in apprehending a thing does not grasp it as a collection of details simultaneously and equally important. Rather, the mind moves. by the momentum imparted to it by the initial impression, to an apprehension of the thing as a whole, not only as it is, but as it has been previously experienced, and even as it has been coloured by emotion.  This sort of mental movement (which is what the psychologists call "per-
ception") may follow either of two different patterns. (1 ) A few details or attributes may be developed to a completely filled outline.  (2) A suggestive or familiar shape or configuration may be supplied with necessary detail. As an example of the first sort of pattern: I see a girl crossing the street a block away, and I recognize her as my old friend,
Mary Jones.  As a matter of fact, her dress is the only thing that I recognize; but from the momentum given by this suggestion my mind moves to a convincing presentation of Miss Jones the colour of her eyes, the way she does her hair, the kind of scent she uses, and what she said to me a week ago Tuesday.  As an example of the second sort of pattern: I
recognize Mary Jones, not from a significant detail, but from a familiar quality of figure or posture.  From this I fill in the essential detail.  As an equally familiar and more striking instance of the second type I may cite the common human propensity for seeing "pictures in the fire", and finding faces, beasts, and monsters in accidental configurations of clouds or stains on the wall.  Though the resemblance may be of the vaguest, so eagerly creative is the unencumbered mind that it moves instantly to supply detail...

"Methinks it is like a weasel.
"It is backed like a weasel.
"Or like a whale?
"Very like a whale."

Graphic art endeavors always to expedite and facilitate the mental movement of the perceptive process. This is the advantage of breadth of handling large simple forms and open planes wherein the mind can move freely through the picture. But if the forms are broken up and the planes cluttered with minute inconsequentials, the mind stops, baffled and resentful. For the mind in a mood of aesthetic contemplation is the mind on a holiday, and simply will not be bothered with the nagging logic of things-as-they-are.

 Herein lies the particular fallacy of the Realist's preoccupation with the literal rendering of minutiae as textures.  For in textures it is peculiarly evident that too much concern with things-as-they-are may prevent one from attaining the perceptive truth of things-as-they-are-experienced.  To render flesh, for example, in terms of pores, hairs, and wrinkles, no matter how accurately it is done, fails utterly to give an experience of
flesh.  Our perception of flesh is to only a limited extent made up of visual facts: impressions gained from other senses, such as warmth, smoothness and firmness, are just as important as surface topoqraphy.  These qualities must be suggested to give the true experience of flesh texture. Such an experience cannot be given by a technique that invites you to trace the wrinkles and count the hairs.

 With numerous references to the "logic of art", the purists have drawn attention to the fact that the camera is essentially a recording instrument, insisting that this fact should condition and limit the product.  To my mind, the logic of art would indicate, rather, that this fact is an irrelevant one, just as irrelevant to the photographer as the fact that paint
smells of turpentine is to the painter. As well, by strict logic, define the etchers needle as "an instrument for scratching" and then limit his activities to nothing but scratching.

 Although they allow themselves the unphotographic luxury of "spotting" their prints, the Realists protest bitterly against retouching of prints or negatives.  Why this intense prejudice against retouching? It belongs to the selective method of all arts. Painters retouch. Etchers retouch.  Writers retouch.  The notebooks of Beethoven reveal the enormous amount of retouching that went into his work. For a photographer to foreswear retouching seems mere affectation.

The whole program of the purists inclines to overlook the basic truth that the final concern of art is not with facts, but with ideas and emotions. ll who talk glibly of new art forms and new techniques must be prepared to cope with that most laconically cruel of all questions: "And so what?" Or to put it less tersely: "What are you trying to tell with your
forms and your techniques?"  Technically speaking, photography is a matter of facts. The image produced by the lens is an optical fact; fixed on paper, it becomes a chemical fact.  A chemical fact can never become a picture unless an idea and an emotion are also present; and these are qualities that cannot be added to the developer.

Many a lowly news photographer in his illustrative embellishments of such themes as Love Nests, and Heiress Elopes with Chauffeur, and Scion of Wealthy Family Leaps to Death, has for years been producing technically perfect "records of actuality" because his job required it of him. It has never occurred to him to make artistic claims for his pictures.  Yet now, like Moliere's Monsieur Jourdain, who was so amazed to discover that he had been talking prose all his life, the press photographer may learn, to his consternation, that he is a purist.

The principal fruit of the purist movement so far has been a series of excellent finger exercises in technique.  This is well and good.  Most aspiring pictorialists don't give themselves half enough hard, grinding work of this sort. But the purists (and here is my ultimate quarrel with) insist emphatically that their finger exercises merit artistic consideration.  Such consideration, I feel, cannot be given them until they are through with ostentatiously playing scales in the key of C.

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It is a matter of common knowledge that Vulcan, the spouse of Venus, was lame in one leg. So far as I am aware, no one has ever told how he met with this misfortune. Thanks to my researches into Pompilius the Younger's monumental and little-known work on The Domestic Life of the Gods, I am for the first time able to offer an adequate explanation for Vulcan's deformity.

 It all goes back to one quiet evening at home on Olympus. Venus and Vulcan were sitting in front of the fire, he twiddling his toes before the blaze, and she stringing beads of lapis-lazuli into some lovely thing.

 After a long silence, Vulcan spoke. "Do you know, dovey," he said, "I have just heard of a new way of making pictures."

 "Indeed?" said Venus absently, slightly wrinkling her lovely brow over her bead work.

 "Yes," said Vulcan. "It seems one draws the picture with light instead of with a stylus."

"But are not all pictures painted so?" remarked Venus sentimentally.  "... By the light that never was on land or sea?"

 "Eh?" said Vulcan.

"Nothing. Just a thought. Pray proceed."

 "I wish you wouldn't interrupt me, darling," said Vulcan irritably.  "Where was I? ... Yes. One makes pictures with a black box and a burning glass and a few odds and ends of chemicals."

 "Pictures?" said Venus skeptically. "What sort of pictures?"

 "Damn good pictures," said Vulcan. "Pictures that look like what they are supposed to be. Not the sort of pictures that this Apelles paints, leaving out a lot of things that any fool would know were there. Now, I could make a picture " He broke off.  "Just why are you smiling in that nasty way?"

 "Oh, Vulcan." she said in slightly smothered tones, "you make a picture?"

 "Why not?" said Vulcan defensively.  "I understand chemistry and physics and optics. Furthermore, I am a good blacksmith.'' He paused.  "For one as lovely as yourself, sweetheart,'' he said, with ominously careful self-control, "you have a most annoying laugh."

 Venus, past reply, waved her hands helplessly.

 "You don't think I could?" he stormed. "Why, I could take a picture of our back fence that would look almost as much like a back fence as our back fence does?"

 A strangled shriek was Venus' only comment.

Vulcan lunged to his feet, his black beard bristling. "Very well," he shouted. "I'll show you. I'll show you, by Jove. I'll take a picture. I will take a picture, if I break a leg doing it." So saying, he stamped out of the room. Venus sighed, wiped her streaming eyes, and returned to her beadwork.

Two days later Vulcan clumped into her presence on crutches. "Precious lamb." said Venus, springing up, "what have you done to your leg?"

 "Oh. damn my leg." said Vulcan, loftily. "Look at this?" And proudly he thrust into her hands a picture.

 "Why. to be sure." said Venus after a moment, "this is your dear old demi-john isn't it? And surely this is a cabbage. And here is an egg."  She smiled at him.  "How terribly clever you are. darling."

... And that, my friends, is how Vulcan broke his leg.

Camera Craft ~ May 1934 ~ Venus And Vulcan William Mortensen An Essay On Creative Pictorialism 3. Selection, and the Function of Control

This is a particularly interesting look at how William Mortensen made a photograph, realized it wasn't to his liking, and then re-worked it three (!!!) more times until he got it "right."  From the point of view of creating images with intention, I find this admirable and very much "of his time."

Looking at the state of photography at the time William Mortensen wrote the following piece I see what was considered "serious" photography was very much intentional.  "Pictorialism" nothing if not intentional.  Consider the works of Clarence White (that great American photographer who taught and influenced so many people), Karl Struss (and his fabulous quartz lenses), Heinrich Kühn (whom I feel was something of a complex person to try and understand), Constant Puyo, Celine Leguard (whom I feel was an absolutely wonderful but largely unknown photographer), Robert Demachy (President of the Camera Club of Paris), and Leonard Missone  (whom I feel was a wonderful "romantic" photographer), as well as many others.  All produced "intentional" works.

I begin to understand how the photographic "purists" of Group F64 came to oppose those who had by now become the "old guard" of Pictorialism.  Growing up in southern California I took up photography at a time when the war had been settled and the "purists" had won.  At least on the west coast of the USA, that is.  I knew nothing of the outside world, such was the narrowness of my view of things.

Going back and reading the actual events that led to the war of west coast photographic ideals is rather instructional for me.  Getting to the source of the matter is enlightening.  In a broader context this war was actually relatively minor.  St. Ansel is not necessarily revered outside the USA any more than, say, Robert Doisneau or Henri Cartier-Bresson are elsewhere.  In fact, this last little war might have been a minor incident that put a period on the end of the photographic pictorialist sentence.

However, there is something enduring from this dust-up for me that echos into the present.  That is William Mortensen's references to craft, art, art school educations, and how this can help inform out "intention" in photography.  Most of us don't go to art school to learn the details Mr. Mortensen describes.  So what exactly did he propose?  Simply to be aware of what one is doing?  To learn more about ones chosen craft?  To lead a deeper, more informed life through art?  To understand not only what a person is doing, but why?  These things and more?  There's more than a bit to "chew on" here.

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The fact that they deal selectively with their picture material is the thing that most definitely and immediately distinguishes the Creative from the Realistic group in present day photography. It is not merely a convenient mark of difference, but a sign of diametric opposition of ideals.  Since the principle of selection is so fundamental a part of the non-realistic creed, it has seemed good to devote a complete article to the exposition and demonstration of this principle.  I realize that, to those who are already in accord with the Creative group, much that I shall have to say will seem a needless labouring of the obvious; but too many people are still supinely accepting the early judgment on the camera, that it is not an art medium, but simply an instrument of record and documentation.

In setting up selectivity as a basis of distinction, I am not ignoring the fact that the Realists do exert a certain degree of selection - as indeed all persons miust who use a camera at all.  Naturally they select subject matter, lenses, photographic materials, exposures; but all their selection is pointed toward securing a picture that shall be thoroughly non-selective - that shall be a complete objective replica, in photographic terms, of the subject. Quite different is the place and function assigned to selection by
the Creative school, for whom it dominates all phases, processes and stages in the making of the picture.

Selection, it is important to realize, is not a mere artistic abstraction but something that is almost a Vital Principle, not only in art but in all the processes of life and growth.  We live by means of the selective functioning of our bodies: each organ and part selects
from the breathed-in air, from the food we eat, from the blood stream those things needful for its sustenance and development.  Thought is a matter of selective dealing with the swift and disorderly stream of consciousness.  Darwin, seeking an explanation of the evolution of higher forms of life from lower, named as the key principle Natural Selection. Life is a selective process: when we stop selecting we stop living. Selection as it manifests itself in art is not a mere casual picking and choosing of the things that the artist likes,  rut an of ten-times laborious searching for the perfect expression of
an idea.  Every work of art is thus the fruit of an evolutionary process rather than a spontaneous creation. So selection in art bears a curiously Darwinian aspect. In its early stages, an art work presents a "struggle for existence" of conflicting ideas, forms and lines, wherein the artist most judge which is the fittest to survive. As the work develops, numerous variations and mutations insinuate themselves into the problem. With these again the artist must assert his god-like prerogative, relentlessly destroying the weak, the common-place, the superfluous, the irrelevant.  Often the original aspect of the conception is completely altered.

The selective process is inseparable from all artistic endeavor because art functions in terms of significant unity while reality manifests itself in terms of outwardly meaningless diversity. The artist senses, behind the shifting, confusing world of appearances, a fundamental unity, relation, meaning and purpose. To make these evident is his task.  His tools are few and inadequate; his -".aerials, the gaudy gim cracks of everyday sense experience. With these scant tools and these banal materials he must try an intimation of the entities he has glimpsed behind the curtain. So in dealing with his materials he works always from the accidental to the significant, from the complicated to the simple, from the many to the one, from the thing to the symbol.

The cameras manner of "seeing is vastly different from the eye's. While the visual angle of the eye is much wider than that of the camera, its range of attention is much narrower.
Thus the literal vision of the camera greatly exceeds that of the eye. which is inclined to see only that which it wishes to see. noting the essential points and ignoring or subordinating the minor ones.  The camera, however, diligently records trivialities along with important matters. But. in concentration and focusing of mental energy, the artist's manner of seeing surpasses the normal manner as far as the eye surpasses the camera.  Hence it is doubly imperative that photography learn to avail itself of selection to the same comprehensive degree that the older arts do: by this it must stand or fall as an art. 
Otherwise we must concede that the camera has no more artistic potentiality than a gas-meter, and that its finest flower is a photostat.

Leaving aside such obvious (and to this article scarcely relevant) fields for seleciton as the choice of subject matter, photographic materials and equipment, the principal stages in the creation of a picture that are amenable to selectivity are the following: (1) dealing with the subject, (2) lighting, (3) projection printing, (4) special processes, (5) final adjustments.  Selection at the arious stages is accomplished through the use of controls. Control in the past, and in the common mind, is largely associated with the removal of warts, wens, wrinkles and similar deformities which afflict unhappy mankind, and with the correction of over-exposure and under-development which afflict the careless photographer. The true function of control, however, is not this negative one, but a positive creative one of building a picture through selection.

 Let me touch briefly on the function of control as it is manifested in each of the five stages just enumerated.  The posing of a model involves delicate psychological problems.
The status of the photographer is somewhat that of a stage director: while he dominates the situation, he must manage to create and maintain an emotional rapport and sense of cooperation between himself and the model. A purely passive model, no matter how accurately he or she follows direction, is limited in usefulness, and a disinterested model is, of course, quite hopeless. But when this understanding does exist, there sometimes occurs that happy experience of an intuitive flash in which the model spontaneously creates the very thing that the artist has been groping for.

Lighting control, of course, goes far beyond the purely mechanical requisite of providing adequate illumination.  It governs the tone value of the subject relative to the background, and determines whether a picture is high or low in key. Emotional and dramatic qualities, as well as mood, are largely established by lighting. It also bears an important relation to composition: the changing of a light may completely alter the
balance and emphasis of a picture.

 Control during the process of projecting the negative is accomplished in several ways. Through local printing are achieved delicacy of drawing, the precise placing of accents, and the corresponding elision of non-essentials.  Through "dodging" the accurate distribution and balance of tone is secured.  Through distortion, general or localized, forms become more expressive and escape from purely literal connotations. Through montage fresh emotional values are created by the repercussion on each other of the emotional associations of two or more images.

Certain special processes recommend themselves because of their amenability to control. These are bromoil, the paper negative, and carbro.  Of the three, bromoil is the most subject to control and carbro the least.  Indeed the possibilities of control in the bromoil process are almost unlimited: local values may be freely altered, distracting detail deleted, significant lines emphasized, and backgrounds added.  In respect to control, the paper negative is but slightly more limited than bromoil. 

 The final operations of control embrace sundry mechanical and chemical adjustments made on the finished print or transfer.  Of these the simplest and most generally practiced is the operation of "spotting". Here likewise are included various toning processes: Russian crayon sauce, dry -pigment toning, and local chemical toning. Mechanical or chemical intensification of high-lights also may be employed at this stage. Analagous to the above methods of control, which are applied to prints, is the "pouncing" with soft ink on a freshly pulled bromoil transfer. Control at this stage should properly limit itself to adjustment and refinements of a structure already well established. Too drastic control at this point is apt to be disastrous.

 

In addition to these five stages of control, there is a sixth control -  a sort of super-control that dominates the selective process through all
the operations of making a picture. This is the picture idea. Toward the
concrete realization of the picture idea are directed all the operations, processes and manipulations through which selection is achieved. The photographer envisions his picture idea in photographic terms. So in his use of controls, though he may selectively modify, intensify and eliminate, he will be careful to retain the integrity of the original image. To allow ample scope for selection he will not limit himself unduly in the matter
of film, but take a generous number of variants of the basic idea. A picture idea of magnitude or subtlety will probably not attain its final form in a single "shooting". Rather, it will evolve through a number of intermediate stages, as the implications of the idea become clearer to the artist.

To illustrate the principle of selectivity in actual operation I have included a series of pictures done at various times, all of them dealing with the theme of Lazarus. The story of Lazarus, the man who was dead and four days in the tomb and then returned again to the world of living men, is one that makes great appeal to the imagination. What memories did Lazarus bring back from the grave? Was he happy or reluctant when
aroused irom his long sleep? Was he changed, and how did other men regard him that had been dead? It was a favorite theme of medieval painters, and such diverse authors as Robert Browning, Leonid Andreifi and Eugene O'Neil have been attracted to it. Pictorially. the idea suggests mystery, drama, and powerful characterization. Also, I discovered, it involves many problems.

The first picture will be recognized by some as a scene from Cecil B. de Mille's well-remembered production The King of Kings, on which I served as "still photographer".
In the preparation of this production no effort or expense was spared to make it completely authentic in costuming and background.  Hollywood's best talent was assembled to act the roles, and technical experts were constantly on the set to check all details.  Here it might seem, was an ideal opportunity to secure a magnificent pictorial result. That such a result was far from being secured is obvious from the picture (Lazarus I). Although it affords a fair record of the bare facts of this particular scene, it has little to recommend it pictorially.  Two things contribute to the failure: first, it is a picture of drama rather than a dramatic picture; second, various faults are introduced by in composition (which I shall presently point out) are introduced by my choice of a wrong camera angle.

The first point is an important one, for it concerns a problem which always must be dealt with in presenting a dramatic subject in pictorial terms.  A dramatic moment consists not only of action but of reaction. Reaction is the inevitable result of action and follows it in time.  To present action alone gives a sense of incompleteness, like a snapshot of a
person walking, with one foot eternally suspended in mid-air. To simultaneously present action and reaction in the same picture produces a feeling of incongruity and results often in the division of interest. Hence drama in pictures should have a passive quality, with emotion predominant and action quiescent or suggested as either on the point of beginning or just ending. In the picture under discussion, there is a subtle conflict between Lazarus' action and the reaction of the crowd in the background. As seen on the screen there would be no such conflict because the time element would there be made evident, with reaction following action.

As to the faults in composition due to my ill-chosen camera angle, they are so numerous and so patent that I will point out only a few of the more glaring ones. In the first place, the figure of Christ is awkwardly placed in the mathematical center of the picture. Compositionally, Lazarus' extended hand occupies the most emphatic point in the picture, and takes on thereby a ludicrous over-significance. The line of the drape falling
from Lazarus' head is cut by the dark mass of the head in front of him. There is a bad division of the darks in the costume of the woman kneeling at Christ's feet si confusing.
The static mass of heads in the background is vaguely Finally, there is a very definite dilemma as to picture interest. Which is the principal figure? Christ commands interest by his position, stature and lighting: Lazarus commands its equally by his gesture.
(These reproaches, I wish to make very clear, are leveled only at my own attempt
to catch the pictorial quality of this scene in a still picture, and not against the interpretation given it in dramatic terms in this truly great production. 

Discovering this print some years later "among my souvenirs", and realizing that it was a good opportunity bungled, I determined to have another try at the subject. At this time, of course, none of the elaborate costumes or settings, and none of the high-priced actors were available. So I posed a number of my friends on a Southern California hillside under a late afternoon sun. For costumes, sundry ragbags were ravished of their contents, and various portieres disappeared from their accustomed places.

Even at first glance Lazarus II is seen to be vastly better pictorially than the earlier effort. There is much more sense of organic relationship ship between the various elements that comprise it, with a certain flow of line from one figure to another.  The placing of the heads forms an interesting pattern.  The question of dominance is more clearly answered than in the first effort.  The second picture is definitely about Lazarus: lighting, placing, and the attention of the other actors make this clear.

 

However, it still falls far short of the potentialities of the situation.  It is still conceived in a literal spirit, there is a certain smugness about it, and, all in all, it is inclined to resemble a Sunday School card. There are numerous flaws in composition. The drapery of the figure at the left is badly arranged and gives little intimation that there is a body beneath it. The placing of white drapery and arm produces a distracting V-shaped configuration over Lazarus' head. The right arm of Lazarus is so lost in shadow that it leaves him without visible means of support, and his legs are awkwardly cut at the ankles by the bushes in the foreground. The figure at the extreme right is so placed and lighted as to attract more attention than it merits.  Christ's face is darker in tone than the face of the woman at his right shoulder, producing a confusion of planes.

Some of these defects could have been remedied had I wished to make a bromoil of the subject.  But it so missed touching the central mystery of the situation that I determined to leave it as it was and make a fresh trial. On consideration it seemed best, since Lazarus was my theme, to omit the figure of Christ, as it was bound,  no matter how much subordinated pictorially to still preempt attention. For the third venture I came indoors
again, working with studio lights in front of a white background, under circumstances permitting the utmost in control. Lazarus III and Lazarus IV represent variant versions of this trial.

In Lazarus III is seen an attempt to compromise with the elimination of the Christ figure by simply showing his hand set in opposition to the darkness of the tomb in the lower left hand corner. This proves better as an idea than as a picture, for there is some difficulty in interpreting the unconnected hand, and the mind is apt to make an unsuccessful effort
to assign it to the woman at the right. Possibly, if Lazarus' right arm had been more extended toward the lower left corner, this opposition would have been better emphasized. At any rate there is far less of a literal quality about this interpretation than the preceding ones. Giving the figures in the background slight modifications of the same pose, and placing their heads high in the picture, creates a formalized, slightly Byzantine feeling. There is one objectionable feature, eliminated in other transfers made of this subject, which I have allowed to remain in this one, because it furnishes a very clear instance of the difference between the eye's way of seeing a thing and the camera's way of seeing it. I refer to the clasped hands beside Lazarus' right ear. To the eye, at the time of taking the picture, they looked simply like - clasped hands; but the camera saw and recorded them as a sort of disembodied artichoke. Elimination of this equivocal object greatly improves the composition, not only by relieving the mind of irrelevant speculation as to what the thing is, but by taking away from the confusion of too many hands in the upper part of the picture, and by giving greater isolation to Lazarus' face.

 Lazarus IV, though less formalized than the third version, is on the whole a simpler rendering. Concentration of interest is assured by removing the last vestige of the bodily presence of Christ, save as it is intimated by the upward glance of Lazarus' eyes. The tonal qualities are broad and simple. The lighting gives a faint hint of the mystery and wonder that belong to this moment. Despite the undetailed black of the figure at the
right of the picture, it is, I believe, the best interpretation so far.

But I was, and still remain, very dissatisfied with it the implications of the theme were so vast and my rendering of it so feeble. Thus far, I realized, I had been toying with the accidental edges of the theme and missing the center of it completely. Despite successive simplifications, my conception was still anecdotal rather than pictorial.  at it, I determined to represent nothing but Lazarus So, for my final try -  mortal man triumph-
ant over mortality, dragged down by the grave, but lifting his face to the light. To do this, it seemed, but four things were needed: a man, an emotion, a background, and an attribute or symbol. Lazarus V is far from satisfying me; but at last the theme begins to speak in direct pictorial terms, and to grope toward something universal and symbolic in-
stead of contenting itself with the mere telling of a story.

 

 The future potentialities of photography, when it shall have achieved a fluent use of the selective methods proper to it, are undeniably impressive.  Up to now, the principal obstacle that has stood in the way of an adequate understanding of selectivity and its application to photographic processes is the fact that too many photographers are lacking in appreciation of basic art traditions. Having arrived at their status as photographers by hard technical study, or having graduated into it from the amateur snapshooter class, they are apt, when dissatisfied with their own work, to dig deeper and deeper into technical subtleties and mechanical complications. Instead of blaming themselves, they blame their cameras, or their lenses, or their developers, and fly for help to manufacturers' catalogues and scan them feverishly like hypochondriacs on the trail of a
new patent medicine. Not corrected lenses, but a corrected viewpoint, is their need; not new developers, but new ideals.

I am not suggesting that every photographer should be a graduate Academy or of the Beaux Arts: specific art training is only to a limited extent useful in photography..  What am suggesting  I of the Pennsylvania. What I am suggesting Beethoven and Brahms is that a knowledge of Beethoven and Brahms is perhaps more important to the photographer than a knowledge of Hurter and Driffield, and that an appreciation of Goethe may take him further than an appreciation of Gamma-factors. Let him frequently desert his darkroom for the symphony hall, the art gallery, or the library. Here he may learn the essential unity of the artist's way of doing things, and come to realize that, as a potential creator, he is the inheritor of all the up-gathered beauty that all creators before him have given to the world.

 

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Of all the ladies on Olympus (as Pompilius the Younger tells us), none had such lovely jewels as Venus*. These she owed to the labours of her crochety but devoted mate, Vulcan. Far into the night he would toil in his grimy workshop, drawing out the recalcitrant gold, silver and bronze into forms of unbelievable intricacy and complexity, set with carnelian, chalcedony and chrysoprase cunningly fitted and curiously engraved. After weeks of such effort he would bring to her a basket brimming with chains, carcanets, tiaras and brooches.

"Here," he would say smugly, setting it before her, "are a few little gadgets that I knocked out in a leisure moment."

Promptly she tipped the basket over and fingered the contents critically.

 "Kind of nice, aren't they?" said Vulcan, expectantly.

 "Now what," said Venus, holding up something between thumb and forefinger, "is this obscene object?"

 "That," said Vulcan, keeping a firm grip on his dignity, "is a chain."

 "To hitch horses with?" said Venus.

 "That chain," Vulcan replied, in a tone of mortal hurt, "has a hundred links, and I spent an hour on each link, chasing and inlaying a tiny pattern."

 "Well, of course, your time's your own."

 "But look at the detail. No one ever got so much detail in so small
a space before."

 "Dear me," said Venus, laying it aside. She examined other articles with obvious distaste.

 "Really, Vulcan," she said at last, holding up an object that dangled, "for a married man you do have the strangest ideas."

 "My dear," said Vulcan patronizingly, "I do not think you appreciate the labour that goes into each of these things. That pendant, for instance, has ten thousand separate pieces of metal in the setting alone."

"But it looks exactly like a cabbage."

"It  is a cabbage," said Vulcan severely.

 "Dear me," said Venus.

She glanced rapidly through the pile, laying each piece aside with an elaborate disillusioned sigh or a sadly tolerent shake of the head.

 Finally Vulcan could stand it no longer. "Very well, madam," he said, "I shall not trouble you further. Never again will I try to make anything for you. Never."

With a magnificent gesture he started to sweep up the tangled pile.

"Wait," screamed Venus. "What is the little one on the bottom of the basket?" 

 "That?" Vulcan stared. "Just something that I hammered out of a bit of waste metal.  I forgot to throw it back into the melting pot."

"But it is beautiful!" She swooped upon the little ornament, put it on, and surveyed herself in the glass with great satisfaction. "Beautiful," she murmured. "Darling, you are so clever." She smiled at him. "And you have such a cute smudge on your nose." 

( Pompilius at this point inserts the Latin equivalent for a row of
asterisks.)

 "Darling," said Venus, "you have messed my hair terribly. Where are you going?"

 "Oh," said Vulcan. "I just have one or two little ideas in jewelry that I want to work out."

 

* I don't think it was intended the way I read it, but I couldn't help but think of Diderot's "Les Bijoux Indiscrets." 

 

Camera Craft ~ April 1934 ~ Venus And Vulcan William Mortensen An Essay On Creative Pictorialism 2. Sources and Uses of Material

Here is the second in William Mortensen's 1934 series of Venus and Vulcan as published in the San Fransisco journal Camera Craft.

Reading through this I remember there's always been a rather significant gap in how people view the world between those who perhaps "think too much" and those who "just want to be."  The ideas and presentation of William Mortensen must have been important only within certain narrow social/cultural fields. 

 

 

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A sort of Hamlet-neurosis that prevents them from making up their minds or arriving at any useful course of action seems to grip most photographic beginners when they at last hold in their hands the earnestly desired and long dreamed of camera. In their fond imaginings they had glimpsed themselves producing (with a simple turn of the wrist)
prints of supernal loveliness which were instantly accepted for the London Salon and hung amid universal acclaim. But when the passionately coveted camera is at last a reality, the nasty thing leers at them with its glass eye, and they suddenly realize that they haven't the vaguest idea what they want to take pictures of. In the very young such indecision is perhaps to be expected, but many photographers old enough in their craft to know their own minds show evidences of the same malady of uncertainty, and give themselves over to futile dilletantism, dillying with still-life and dallying with landscape, and, in a word, rapidly getting nowhere. Even the sincerest worker will, in his candid moments, admit to spells of doubt and confusion, when his purposes and plans seem all awry and his well-ordered world a chaos. It was in such a moment that I once imagined a picture in the grand style (possibly a mural for a Camera Club) that might be called
"The Frustrated Photographer'' a huge monumental figure of a man standing on the curve of the world; in his hands, a camera; on his face, an expression of bewilderment and  desperation. Surrounded by a world teeming with people, colours, shapes he stands appalled and utterly at a loss.

 The world is a confusing place to live in, no doubt about it. People, things, shapes, colours, smells, noises, blazing light and bewildering darkness are all scrambled up in it, and there are times when it seems to make no sense at all. The artist, perhaps more than any other person, is aware of this chaos in nature, and, more keenly than any other person, he desires order. Fundamental to all art is a sanitary impulse to tidy up this disorderly world, and give it sense and meaning and direction. Herein the artist and scientist are as one, for they both seek to arrange nature into comprehensible patterns, or at least to find a few points of reference amid the uncharted, whirling confusion. The sources of material that I am going to discuss provide such points of reference, whereby the storm-tossed pictorialist, floundering in the flux of existence, may be able to orient himself.

There is one type of photographer who is aware of no such need of orientation, because he meets confusion with confusion, chaos with chaos. No heavy consciousness of purpose weighs down this happy mortal who whatever snapshoots as he goes. Sunsets, old shoes, beautiful faces arouses his interest for the moment, he squanders film upon with hap-
hazard,, uncritical enthusiasm. Good pictures are no doubt sometimes obtained by this method, thanks to the occasionally beneficent operation of the usually hostile laws of chance, but to discuss it here would be of no more avail than suggestions on how to win at roulette. Genuine artistic activity is invariably based on plan and channeled to a narrow choice of subject matter.

"But," protests the frustrated photographer with a slight quaver in his voice, "how can one make a choice amongst all the profusion and confusion of things?" The answer to this, as to some other pressing problems, is to let nature take its course. The initial choice of subject matter is usually not something that should be made, but something that makes itself A normal mind generally exhibits a predilection toward a single clearly defined type of subject matter.  Realization of this fact will serve to eliminate a great deal of the prevalent photographic neuresthenia.

The number of fundamental types of picture-minds, as indicated by their instinctive selection of material, is not large. Let us, to make the matter clearer, consider a concrete instance. Imagine, if you will, that five photographers are observing the scene in the Grand Central Station during a rush hour surely a subject full of complication and confusion.  What picture material will they find there? ... Their choice of subject matter will fall probably into one of five categories.  One of them might see in the crowd nothing but faces young or old, tired or eager, resigned or rebellious and among them one face would standout, vivid and significant, and demand to be made into a picture.  Another of these five gentlemen, being of a poetic temperament, would be sensitive to the emotional tone or atmosphere of the scene. He might conceive of a strained, taut figure set against a background of hastening crowds, to be titled Rush Hour. For the third photographer the human values would predominate. Here and there among the multitude he would observe little dramas in progress joyous meetings and saddened partings, newcomers bewildered in the throng, and disappointed watchers. The fourth photographer, however,
gives little attention to these things. He notices rather the interesting patterns made by the crowd as it swirls and eddies, or the design of shadows cast by the sun slanting through the great windows.

These four, if they had their cameras with them, might conceivably get their pictures on the spot. But the fifth man, who is of a philosophic and speculative turn of mind, gets his ideas there and produces his pictures elsewhere. For him a picture idea would take the form of a proposition, such as: "We are too much in a hurry," or "People should travel more."  

To demonstrate the first he might produce a cartoon-like composition of huge hurrying feet, crushing down populations and cities, spurning everything in their insane haste to get somewhere else. For the second proposition he might aduce an illustration of a lovely lady reclining at ease in her luxurious Pullman drawing-room while the miles slip by outside. Such a picture as the latter he might (if his instincts were commercial as well
as philosophic) dispose of to the New York, New Haven and Hartford for a tidy profit.

 Despite the infinite variety of nature, these five types of picture minds fulfilling themselves through Personality, Mood, Drama, Pattern and Propoganda are fundamental enough to cover practically all pictorial activity.  Artists who have accomplished most will be found to have expressed themselves along one of these lines. The eclectically minded butterfly who flits from flower to flower may entertain himself a great deal, but the person who discovers and sticks to his natural predeliction for picture material will go much further.

The various schools of photography that were discussed in the last article would of course deal with these five sources of material in their respective characteristic idioms. Let us examine these sources somewhat more in detail, noting the possible Realistic, Non-realistic and Meta-realistic interpretations of each.

Assuming for the moment that our frustrated photographer has overcome his frustration to the extent of fixing on personality as the phase of pictorial expression most congenial to him, he is apt (if he is like other mortals) to be still subject to doubts and confusions. He is confronted, for instance, with Mary Jones, a definite personality.  The camera is set, the light is right, Mary is waiting: what is he going to do? Two general courses are open to him. He may, in the first place, render Mary Jones as Mary Jones: a faithful likeness, in other words, save for a possible tactful subordination of Mary's grosser physical blemishes.  If Mary Jones is a personality of outstanding strength the resulting picture may turn out to be a very interesting and vital thing. If she is not, it will be just another "camera portrait," of no interest at all except to Mary and her admiring friends.

On the other hand, he may see in Mary Jones, not the accidental things that distinguish her from Gwendolen Chumley, but the important eternal things wherein Mary and Gwendolen are the same. She becomes significant, not as an individual, but as a manifestation of the Eternal Feminine.  He may visualize her, perhaps, standing amid the growing grain, deep-breasted and broad-thighed, as Ceres, mother of harvests.  Or as "Mystery, Babylon the Great," whose sins were written on her forehead.  Or without allusion, simply as a woman. Such universal large conceptions would call for broad monumental treatment. He would eliminate everything accidental and contemporary in costume, head-dress and pose, and strive for the utmost simplicity of line and mass. He would take advantage of the facility for control afforded by such processes as bromoil
transfer and paper negative, and would utilize the resources of "projection control" for selective simplification, elimination, or distortion, in order to purge his conception of mere personal and individual implications. Working along these lines, he might well find the abstract qualities of the nude adapted to his purpose. But if his interest lay in the direction of faithful likeness, he would not, if he were a person of any taste, resort to the
nude; for it would immediately raise questions as to the propriety of Mary Jones thus exposing herself, and introduce numerous other considerations, all non-aesthetic.

He might also make the experiment of photographing Mary from various strange and unaccustomed camera angles, but in so doing he would reveal that his preoccupation
was with pattern rather than personality.

 The first mentioned method of rendering Mary Jones is, of course, the realistic one, and the second, which interests itself in personality as type rather than individual, is the non-realistic, creative interpretation.  It is in the field of sincere, direct portraiture that the greatest opportunity of the realist lies, an opportunity that he, oddly enough, has rather neglected. Of course, and here is the sticking point, the sole strength of such portraiture depends on the strength of the subject, and without the interest of a rarely dominating personality it degenerates into either a conventional camera portrait or an unpleasantly detailed topographical map of skin imperfections. It might appear that personality could not possibly come within the purview of the Meta-realists, but they have touched on it by inference and satiric implication. I have seen a quaintly comic photomicrograph of a bug that in charm of personality and thoughtful quality of expression far surpassed many a countenance seen on the screen.

If our photographer seeks to express himself through the second medium, of mood or atmosphere, he will find his material most clear and unpolluted in the moods of Nature herself. Leonard Misonne finds it in still country lanes and village streets in the early morning light, and from trees, earth, sunlight and sky he builds quietly lyrical effects. Human figures and human habitations, when they appear, seems as firmly rooted in the Flemish soil as trees. Leaving the country-side for the great city, one may find impressions of power and speed and multitude such as Margaret BourkeAVhite has given in her pictures. Elementary forces - wind and waves and leaping flames - call up emotional images. So also does music, however distasteful the idea may be to those that hold that music is an absolute art. The strength and masculine stride of a Bach toccata, the lascivious musing of The Afternoon of a Faun, the solemn gothic mysticism of Cesar Franck's D minor symphony, all teem with images, and are a rich and scarcely touched vein of material for the pictorialist. "Montage" is often useful in the creation of atmosphere of a sophisticated, synthetic type, building up an emotional impression by
means of a related series of super-imposed images.

The strict realist expresses a pious aversion to mood as a photographic material, although it occasionally appears, in an accidental fashion in his pictures. Mood is too evanescent and fleeting a thing to interest much the classically minded, but it is the very breath of life to the Romantics: they are most sensitive to it and best understand its use.  Boecklin among painters and Misonne among pictorial photographers supply notable instances of the romantic interpretation of mood. In their handling of strange and delicate atmospheric effects the meta-realists reveal with particular clearness their close sympathy with the Romantics. 

The third photographer, who picks drama as the field of his endeavor deals with human qualities, not static and composed, but in action and reaction, coping with problems, struggling with opposition, meeting obstacles. These struggles and problems and their emotional over-tones constitute drama. No other field of pictorialism is so wide in its appeal: it caters to every taste, from the lachrymose sentiment of the well-known
chromo, "The Doctor," to the stark horror of Goya's close-ups of war.  In no other field is bad taste so blatantly exhibited, and no other offers such challenge to the genuine imagination.

Drama may appear in either of two ways, explicitly or implicitly.  In the first case one has to do with a more or less literal representation of a scene, a pictorial anecdote or "story-telling picture." Outstanding examples of this type are furnished by Hogarth in his "Rake's Progress" and "Marriage a la Mode." Instances of the successful use of this sort of drama in pictorial photography are exceedingly rare, though unsuccessful instances crowd every amateur competition. Drama of the second type, the implied, deals not with overt actions and confrontations of opponents, but with suggestions, masked emotions, power held in restraint, moments heavy with potentialities and reminders of storms just past. Thus there is drama in character portrayal; for character is the cumulative result of accomplished struggles. It is this dramatic perspective that distinguishes great portraits, such as da Vinci's drawing of himself as an old man, and Titian's portrait of Sixtus X. In the meeting of drama and personality is one of the richest opportunities of the pictorialist.

Drama of the direct explicit sort, and also the implied drama of racial character, lend themselves to reatment in the realistic vein, as is clearly demonstrated in Anton Bruehl's photographic records of Mexico.  To both the classic and the romantic variants of the non-realistic method drama is a congenial medium. The Romantics especially, with their exuberance and feeling for contrast, find in drama, either of the explicit or implied kind, their fullest and most characteristic expression. A weird and strange sort of drama is certainly possible to the meta-realistic manner, though I have seen no instances of it.

The fourth of our photographers in the Grand Central Station, as you may remember, was attracted to the patterns created by the swirling crowds and the designs of light and shadow. Other themes likely to attract the lover of pattern are still life, architecture, and formal landscape. The most effective presentation of pattern is in terms of rather
neutral subject matter: the introduction of the human element usually detracts from the pattern-interest. For the photographer, at any rate, the "abstract design" and "absolute pattern" so dearly beloved by theorist and aesthete are non-existent. The camera dictates that you must have subject matter of some sort. Even the geometric arrangements in mothballs or sugar cubes, so much in favor a year or so ago, have their perfectly concrete subject matter.  Pattern manifests itself in two ways: as inherent, or as created. That is, the devotee of pattern may either take it as he finds it ready-made in accidental
arrangements and in nature forms, or he may work freely with his material, shaping it into patterns, building still-life arrangements to fit a decorative scheme, or by "projec-
tion control" distorting forms into a preconceived significance. The use of "camera angles" is a special case of created pattern: in seeing a familiar chair, for instance, from an unfamiliar angle, you are for the first time cognizant of it as a shape, a mass and a design, instead of as a humble, utilitarian piece of furniture.

The realists lay much stress on "texture" and "tonal relation," which are, of course, aspects of pattern.  But they are interested in these things primarily as subjects for complete and veracious rendering, not for their expressive qualities. The expressive qualities of pattern are much valued by the non-realists, though the energetic Romanticists seldom find pattern sufficiently exciting to treat as an end in itself. The meta-realists. however, revel in it, and, in the few authentic examples of their work, they
have above all revealed a facility for discovering and presenting new and fantastic patterns ranging from etherial fragility to a sort of gothic grotesque.

The four types of picture minds that we have just discussed represent primary sensual and aesthetic reactions to nature. The reaction of the fifth type, the didactic, propagandizing type, is secondary and intellectual. Ideas, not sensations, are its basic materials, and the art-form is strictly subordinated to them. Two things mark the propagandist the fact that he is obsessed by an opinion, and that he wishes to persuade
you to a course of action. How shall he persuade you? Quiet speaking and subtle reasoning are of no avail. Paradoxically enough, propaganda, though dealing with ideas, must express itself in terms of action and emotion. Because of their direct sensory appeal, pictures are perhaps the most effective form that propaganda can take. Propaganda of this type impinges upon our minds at every waking hour, pictorially branding upon
our consciousness the virtues of Listerine, Fleishmann's Yeast and Campbell's Soups. The corner grocery and the Fifth Avenue shop resort to it equally. Such excellent photographers as Steichen and Bruehl have turned their hand to propaganda of this kind. The political cartoon is another variety of pictorial propaganda with which we are all familiar.

But provinces less limited than these are open to the propagandist.  The whole human comedy is his. Joining with the sardonic amusement of the ironist or the moral indignation of the satirist, he may castigate human absurdities, obscenities and brutalities, and seek the reform of humanity by revealing to it its own depravity. Goya's Disaster of War and Caprichos belong to this high type of propaganda. So also do Daumier's drawings of the law courts. Pictures such as these are not purely "pictorial" in their appeal, and frequently carry a literary appendage in the form of an ironic title. But considerations of pictorial purity did not deter Daumier and Goya, nor will it discourage any modern propagandist with an idea worth expressing.

Though the realists are diligent and effective propagandists for their own method, the unliteral, "non-photographic" character of propaganda prevents them from using it in their pictures. The fact that it usually involves a symbolism of some sort, and always involves a passionately held opinion, gives propaganda a particular appeal to the Romantics. I know of no instance of propaganda in the meta-realistic idiom, but the
arresting and startling aspects of familiar things that this method discovers to us makes it peculiarly adapted to dealing with ideas.

For clearness' sake, in discussing the five types of picture-minds and their respective sources of material, I have elected to consider these types "pictorial" in their appeal,
the form of an ironic title as existing in a state of hypothetical purity. In reality, of course, the five rarely appear unmixed. Pattern will lend strength to mood, and drama and personality give power to propaganda. I have already mentioned the effective manner in which personality and drama complement each other.  However, in such mixed types there is always so clear a dominance of one of the contributing elements that there is no difficulty in classification.  Of the five, pattern, perhaps, most seldom makes its appearance either alone or as the dominating member in a combination. But even as a secondary element it remains powerful, and extremely rare is the picture that does not owe its qualities of clarity, strength and unity to the subtle and scarcely suspended influence of pattern.

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Pompilius the Younger informs us that when Venus and Vulcan settled down to domesticity, Vulcan at his wife's importunity built her a five-sided tower with a room at the top with five windows in it. Venus was fond of sitting in this upper room, gazing now out of one window and now out of another. Pompilius surmises that the five windows represent the five senses, but perhaps we shall not err in suggesting that they may be construed as symbolizing the five sources of pictorial beauty.  Pompilius further relates that when Venus descended from her tower she would amaze Vulcan with reports of the wonders she had seen from her windows. Once in a while his curiosity would lure him up the stair to her room, and he would peer out, blinking and short-sighted. But he
could see nothing but people and trees and mountains and things nothing at all to get excited about and presently he would snort disgustedly at women's foolishness and rush pell-mell back to his cellar and his forge; for black-smithing was his trade, and he understood it.

Photography of the present day is witnessing Vulcan in the throes of one of his periodic restless spells. The technician is tumultously invading the domain of the creative worker, deriding the latter's vision of the world, and asserting the primacy of optics, mechanics, and chemistry.  Venus, though somewhat irked by the aggressive mood of her spouse, is
not unmindful of her debt to him, and so she possesses her soul in patience; for she knows from past experience that he will soon return grumbling to his endless productive labours in the workshop.

Camera Craft ~ March 1934 ~ Venus And Vulcan William Mortensen An Essay On Creative Pictorialism Interpretations Of Reality

Saint Ansel, Bohemian Ed Weston, Morely Baer, and others heavily influenced me while I was growing up in southern California.  When Saint Ansel wrote something, I took it at face value and didn't really question why he wrote what he did.  So when he wrote that "straight" photography was better than anything William Mortensen did (naming names, even) I immediately thought Mortensen was in the wrong and his photography was of little to no value.  Further, emulating St. Ansel's techniques and choosing the photography tools he chose seemed to me the best way to proceed.  Period.

Years later I learned the photographic world is much more subtle than I originally took it for.  I began to appreciate some of William Mortensen's images and started reading through his early Camera Craft books on lighting, modeling, and processing.  Over the years I've wondered a bit about the tension between Adams and Mortensen and could never get to the bottom of it.  Group 64 had their position and my little world didn't seem to tolerate any different approach.

That's how it appeared to me, at least.  Living on the west coast of the US was a very limiting, narrow experience.  It was rather arrogant of me, really.

Moving out of the US has had the fortunate effect of teaching me just how broader and wider the world of photography actually is.  There are as many approaches to seeing the world and creating unique images as there are photographers pursuing the practice.  It seems all so obvious to me, now, but my own borrowed/adopted narrowness got in the way.

Recently I've worked to expand my knowledge of photographers and their contributions to the craft.  In the process I stumbled upon a nice collection of pdf files on archive dot org of the early Camera Craft publications.  The very first one I read contained a few articles and letters to the editor that I'm finding utterly fascinating.  It contains a portion of the history of how photography was still evolving in 1934 and provides pointers to where the schism between St. Adams and William Mortensen originated.

What I'm doing here is providing an article, copied and pasted from a pdf written by William Mortensen that talks about different approaches to photography, and why he feels more value in some and not others.  Mortensen provides a critique of soft focus lens use in Pictorial works which is sometime Group 64 seems to have completely ignored.  This is perhaps because he provides a direct and strongly worded critique of Group 64.  It must have caused a fair amount of gnashing of teeth and wagging of fists and I  will share two letters to the editor written by Willard Van Dyke in a future post. 

 

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Venus And Vulcan ~ William Mortensen
An Essay On Creative Pictorialism Interpretations Of Reality

In the days when the world was young and humanity was still in the period of its innocence, Art (if we are to believe Spengler and other philosophers of history) was the result of instinctive and intuitive reactions of joy, fear, and wonder.  But, we are told, when the serpent of Sophistication crept into this paradise, man turned crafty and knowing, and Art became calculating, self-conscious, and decadent. Judged on this basis, photography, as the youngest of the arts, is showing clear signs that it is about to doff its pinafore and enter into a swash-buckling, hell-raising adolescence. Among these signs we may note an increasing number of discussions (of which this is one) of the true end and significance of photography. It is evident that a spirit of healthy dissension is abroad in the ranks of photographers, and that where once their one thought was to stand together against the jeers of other arts, they have now sufficiently found themselves to form inner alignments, parties and schools.

When Dr. Draper in 1840 posed his sister under the noonday sun and focused his weird contraption of lenses and chemically treated plates upon her for twenty minutes, he probably had no intimation of the awful consequences of his act of taking the first photograph of a human countenance. To Dr. Draper and the other pioneers photography was a scientific issue merely, complicated by almost insuperable technical problems. It was as a scientific curiosity that the camera made its first public appearance. For years the simple wonder of the fact that this instrument was able to record the simulacrum of everything that its glassy eye beheld was enough to justify it. But soon, even in its quite primitive state, the camera made known its unexampled facility for recording and documenting events; and this was the second stage in its evolution. Then appeared the portentous phenomenon of a man named Eastman. His is the heavy responsibility of making the camera popular by putting it and photographic materials within the reach of everyone. There ensued the era of the "snap shot."  Irresistible, indefatigable Kodak army swept round the world, from Eiffel Tower to Matterhorn, from Karnak to Taj Mahal, and wherever they went there was a tremendous clicking of shutters. Events and persons far better forgotten were given a fearful immortality.  And this was the third stage.

Early in the snap-shot era the development of photography reached its fourth phase. To the accompaniment of jeers, groans and catcalls from the practitioners of the older graphic arts first London Photographic Salon timidly made its bow forty years ago. That this young upstart, this scientific toy, the camera, should dare to artistic pretensions, was to painters, etchers, lithographers, a jest of epic proportions. And to tell the truth there was much justice in their merriment, for the early salons were mostly shots. made up of pictures that were in essence simply superior snap-shots. But amongst them all were a few prints that, by reason of their imaginative quality, stood out against the Olympian laughter of the Academicians.

Aside from the manifest shortcomings of taste and artistic training betrayed by the first salons, the thing that most drew the fire of critics was the essentially mechanical nature of the camera itself. "The camera is merely a recording instrument," they said, "and has no more to do with art than a thermometer or a stethescope. It is like an idiot's eye: it sees
everything and is incapable of saying anything about it." Stung by this rebuke, the early pictorialists began doing everything in their power to conceal the clean lines of their images. They diffused their pictures till all their forms sprouted whiskers of cotton wool. They indulqed in various ill-advised efforts to imitate paintings of the boudoir school. They abused the gum-bichromate process so that their pictures lost all sense of definition and most of the half-tones.

Despite the many departures from good taste and good sense and the uncertain technique of these pioneers of pictorialism, the quality of the work exhibited in the salons gradually took on substance and dignity, the clamour of the critics became less strident, the public became more generous in its recognition, and what was most important, the photographers shed their crushing inferiority complexes and began to take candid stock of themselves. And at this point, which is coincidental with the last few years, photography entered into its fifth phase. Pictorialists, no longer obsessed by what other artists thought of them, began to give consideration to the implications, functions and aims of their own art. Should photography be imitative, representative or expressive? What is the importance of technique?  What of processes that are not strictly optical, mechanical and chemical?

 The effort to answer these and similar questions revealed a wide divergence of opinion and gave rise to corresponding divergence in practice.  No longer is it possible to classify a photographer as simply good or bad, as a portrait photographer, or as a maker of landscapes.  For there are now evident several distinct schools of thought and procedure
in the pictorial field.

The fundamental division between these schools seems to be based on their varying methods of dealing with reality. Reality the substantial world of shapes and colours, lights and darks, people and personalities, with which we are surrounded is the material with which all graphic artists must deal. In grappling with this raw reality artists resort to
various methods. To some of them Reality is something to be embraced: to others, something to be moulded; and to still others, something to plunge into and pass beyond.

The first method we may call because it frankly embraces reality-realistic.  The realist takes the world as it is. and is damn proud of the fact. The essence of his method is non-selectiveness. All things that choose to record themselves on his negative are equally sacred. Choice of subject is of no account to him; it is the completeness and literalness of
rendition that matters. He lays great stress on the "photographic" quality of his photographs: that is to say, he strives, by all the resources of fine lenses, filters, long exposures with reduced aperture, and super-sensitive film to get onto the negative every thing recordable in the subject, and by means of a contact print on glossy paper to give a complete and objective replica of it.

The principal exponents of this manner of working are Americans, and the chief stronghold of the school is the Pacific coast. One phase of their peculiar technique led to their being tagged the "F. 64 group", a convenient and concise appellation which they themselves have not disowned.

Tested by its results this school fluctuates between commendable sincerity and deplorable taste.  I attribute its present vogue to a healthy reaction against the weakly romantic and sentimental trend of early pictorial photography. Its adherents are outspoken and obviously honest in their belief that photography culminates and fulfills its destined function in their movement. They have a clearly reasoned and consistent idealogy and, more than any other group, have recognized and defined their objective. However, my own feeling is that they have set out to harrow a very sterile and unfertile field, and that they will speedily exhaust its possibilities.  Though their technical accomplishments are noteworthy, the ideal they have set up of complete literal recording is a very primitive one.  A good beginning but not an end in itself.  What they offer is a
discipline, and an excellent one; but so far they offer nothing beyond the discipline.

To the practitioners of the second method of coping with reality the material that the world affords respecting it is something to be dealt with creatively, as the sculptor respects the tough marble under his chisel, but not permitting it to dictate the bargain.
The "thing-in-itself" is of no account save as a vehicle of expression. Hence the forms, the lines, the details are all subject to significant simplification and alteration in order that the picture-idea may more clearly express itself. Hence all striving for greater and greater detail, all straining to capture subtleties of tone and texture, even all searching after refinements of technique, are in themselves completely irrelevant to the making of pictures. To the adherent of the Non-realistic, creative manner of working, the finished picture is the be-all and end-all, its own aim and its own justification.

The Classic and Romantic are simply variants of the non-realistic method. Although these two are traditionally represented as diametrically opposed in all respects, they are in fact much closer to each other than they are to the position of the Realist. Their similarities are much more numerous and much more significant than their differences. One may say
that the Classic represents the impersonal, passive aspects of the non-realistic school, and the Romantic, the personal, active aspects.

The classic stripping method subordinates the personality of the away all excrescences of time and place, artist, and, exalts the timeless, universal qualities of the subject. Details and textures are swallowed up in the large conception of the whole. Even where action is indicated there is a sense of repose and balance.  Though classic art may find its subjects
everyday life, it stands above the turmoil, remote and austere. Dealing with familiar things, it does not invite familiarity. Egyptian, archaic Greek and, above all, Chinese art typify the classic spirit. But not all the classicists are dead by any means. Echague, the great Spanish pictorialist, is pre-eminently a classicist in thought and method.

The romantic method, on the other hand, exults in the personal quality of the artist's idiom. Rather than exercising restraint, it glories in the exuberant outpouring of forms and ideas. Rich, strong contrasts, both in subject matter and execution, lend a note of excitement. The expressive qualities of line and mass are exploited to the utmost, and the
Grotesque becomes important. Transitory moods and fleeting emotional impressions are emphasized. It is recognizably our world that Romance deals with, but luminated with strange lights.

One misguided and now nearly out-dated manifestation of the non-realistic method in photography needs to be mentioned if only to disown it.  This is the Fuzzy-Wuzzy school of twenty years ago. Early pictorialists, distressed by the literalness of the camera, seized with avidity on the soft-focus lens as a means of suppressing irrelevant detail and secur-
ing breadth of effect. Unfortunately, relevant detail was equally suppressed, and the effect was not only broad, but mushy. Soft-focus is still occasionally resorted to; but, now as then, fuzzy forms, indeterminate outlines, emasculated angles, and a weakly sentimental atmosphere are the inevitable results of its use, owing to the essentially non-selective character of diffusion.

What the non-realistic seek is not diffuseness, but increased clarity of expression.  To accomplish this, forms must be simplified or exaggerated, certain lines must be given significant movement, tonal contrast must be effectively placed, distracting detail must be suppressed. All this means selection. So the adherents of the creative school will for all
stages of photographic procedure choose the equipment, material, and processes that are most susceptible to control; for it is through control that selection is achieved.

Recent German publications have hinted at a third method of dealing with reality, one in which the unquestionable high technical attainments of the realists may find their logical outlet. The accomplishments of this method at present practiced only by a small group of German photographers are sometimes credited to the F.64 school, but these accomplishments represent a different and more significant departure.

This new method has been made possible by late developments and refinements of optical equipment. I have chosen to call the method "Meta-realistic", because it does not stop with the world as we know it, but plunges into it and passes beyond it into a new world of beauty and fantasy. The camera has a unique capacity for seeing further into a thing than the eye does and discovering refinements of texture, differences of tone, and tiny hidden patterns that neither the casual eye of the average beholder nor the searching eye of the artist suspected were there. The normal eye has a range of sensitivity that extends from the slow vibrations of the red rays to the high speed of violet. The camera makes visible violet even the extremely slow vibrations of moderate heat, and on the end of the spectrum reaches far beyond the eye's capacity.

While these are not things that lie within average human experience, they are nevertheless capable of arousing aesthetic emotion. The thought that there are unsuspected universes within our grasp, limitless fields of exploration no further away than the ends of our noses, is like a cold wind blowing from the spaces between the stars, causing us to dream and to wonder. And so it happens that the work of the Meta-realists is pervaded with the same "strangeness added to beauty" that distinguishes the best work of the Romantics.

At present the only exponents of the true Meta-realist procedure are a  few German photographers. They push their optical equipment to strange extremes, not to reveal unimportant detail, nor as a mere technical stunt, but because the result is beautiful. In Das Deutsche Lichtbild, patterns of dew 1933, are published numerous examples of their work drops on grass blades, spider webs, amazing forms of plant growth opening to us a realm of a new kind of beauty, magic and unearthly. The Meta-realists represent a phase of pictorial photography whose very existence is barely glimpsed, and whose potentialities are at this time unpredictable.

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When the foam-borne Venus, goddess of beauty, came to high Olympus, Jupiter, in his quaint way, married the lovely creature to Vulcan the blacksmith. To the superficial critic this union might appear a sad mesalliance; but, by all accounts, the match panned out very well. To be sure, there were a few fearful rows when she called him a dull-witted
yokel that didn't appreciate her, and he denounced her as a frivolous, irresponsible hussy, but on the whole they got along very amicably. Unquestionably she brought light and a new meaning into his dark existence, and he bent all his skill at the forge to fashion jewels for her adornment.

The wedding of Technique to Aesthetic Impulse is a difficult problem.  Technique is apt to be over-earnest and self-assertive, and has been known to claim that he married A. I. only in order to make an honest woman of her, a statement which she justly resents.  She, in her turn, has sometimes compared her family to his family to the great detriment of the latter. Each has on various occasions packed up and walked out on the other, but they just don't seem to be able to get along without each other.

To study the contemporary relations of this quarrelsome couple will be the object of further articles of this series. A permanent reconciliation may be too much to hope for, but it should be possible to establish a basis for better future understanding.

This is the first of a series of five articles by Mr. Mortensen.  Next month he will write on the "Sources and Uses o[ Material". Ed.