Royal Photographers

Having decided month ago that a number of eminent U. S. painters were also worthy artists, the stodgy National Academy of Design last week relaxed still further and admitted, 84 years after the death of Daguerre, that photography is an art. For the first time in the Academy's history it sponsored an exhibition of photographic prints at its musty Manhattan headquarters. It called the show "the most notable demonstration of artistic skill by means of the camera which has been displayed in this country."

But, beyond lending its name and its walls, the National Academy had little to do with the exhibit. The 155 prints were assembled by the Royal Photographic Society of London from the portfolios of 134 U. S. photographers, 21 photographic clubs and magazines and the Smithsonian Institute. Last December Royal Photographers were able to see the pictures that the National Academy was exhibiting last week. Royal Photographer

Joseph M. Bing, in charge of the hanging, bustled about with pins and pictures, as he explained:

"This exhibition is a living demonstration of the new taste in photography which has been developing in the last ten years. Photography has abandoned the idea of making pictorial records of what the lens has before it, and the artists now are painting with light. In short they have brought it about so that art photography today represents the emotions, so that they are just as vibrant as paintings."

It was in protest against exactly that kind of '"emotional" photography 30 years ago--pictures that attempted to look as much like oil paintings as possible with trick lighting, diffused lenses and elaborate retouching--that famed Photographer Alfred Stieglitz started his little magazine Camera Works, and opened his first gallery in Manhattan.

There were far too many "picturesque" pictures in the Academy show last week but among them were plenty of prints of the sort of work that modern photographers are trying to do. Examples:

The Heavy, by Will Connell of Los Angeles, who achieved a startling effect with three quarters of the face of a snaggle-toothed pop-eyed cinema extra (see cut).

Southern Mammy, by oldtime William H. Zerbe of the New York Herald Tribune, one of the few U. S. newscameramen who are also associates of the Royal Photographic Society. His print was a pleasant unaffected portrait of an old Negro woman puffing a clay pipe, her face gleaming with high lights like a figure of carved mahogany.

Eighty-Five Years, by Eugene Hutchinson of Manhattan, a study of two, thin clasped hands against a black dress.

Gerhart Hauptmann, by Edward J. Steichen, probably the greatest photographer in the U. S. Photographer Steichen posed the great German playwright against an artificial starlit sky, made him look more like the elder Goethe than usual.

Force, by Alex J. Krupy of Chicago, a study of a glistening drive wheel of a locomotive at rest.

Most effective nude was The Vase and the Maid by Royal Photographer Fred P. Peel in which the body of a standing model is cut by a strange T-shaped arrangement of black velvet. Most banal photograph was A Pleasant Road by Mrs. Rowena Brownell of Providence, R. I.

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