Excerpt from Modern Printing Processes: Gum Bichromate and Platinotype Papers

As ai - rule, the painters of this and other countries are prejudiced against photography and they argue that it is simply a mechanical process and hence can never be recognized as Art.' Their argument has always been that a work of art must possess a dis tinct individuality; that a mere copy of nature, a chunk of so many feet cut out from a landscape, just as it happened to appear to the man with the camera, is not Art, no matter how faithfully nature is copied. They hold that a person viewing a land scape does not see all of it with equal distinctness, and that the prominent object or objects, whether situated in the foreground or middle foreground, must be more prominent than the balance of the picture, and that right here is one of the great faults of photography; that the lens sees all parts of the view with equal clearness or sharpness, and that this sharpness is the chief detriment when the picture is viewed from an artistic standpoint. Knowing the sentiment of painters in regard to photography, and having carefully noted their criticisms, certain work ers have revised their methods of focusing and ex posure, so as to make the results conform more closely to the tastesof the critics; but even then the resultswere not satisfactory, when ordinary printing-out papers, with extremely high finish, were employed in making the prints. Papers, then, which gave softer results, were looked for and the choice of such workers naturally fell upon platinotype and gum bichromate papers, the former to be purchased from any dealer and the latter to be made by the photog rapher.

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