Page:Camera Work No. 1 (January 1903).pdf/24

 A CHAT ON THE LONDON PHOTOGRAPHIC SALON. FOREWORDS (From the Catalogue)

HE ABOVE few words, with a short description of the history and aims of the Linked Ring, confront the reader on an early page of the catalogue of this tenth annual exhibition of the Parent of Photographic Salons, which was opened with the usual Private View on September eighteenth. To say all London was there would be inaccurate, but this function yearly becomes more crowded, and one can not help noticing a more intelligent interest on the part of the visitors. But with this much acknowledged, the outsider still persists in asking at times the funniest of questions and making the quaintest of remarks with regard to the photographs, which, if collected and properly served up, would form amusing reading. "But do they use cameras?" was the quite serious query of a lady who had no wish to be funny. The none often overhears the "Oh, I must take up photography myself," in a patronizing tone, as a smart woman rustles by. "What does it mean!" is another very general question, and one which was constantly applied to Clarence White's The Spider-web.

THIS being the tenth year of the Salon's existence, special efforts have been expended to make the Dudley Gallery suit the pictures. The walls are hung with a coarse brown holland, and the familiar ugly roof is hidden with a canopy of fine lawn, which diffuses the light and gives a far more complimentary effect than in other years. The walls are broken up into panels by ivory-colored moldings, each panel comprising a small show in itself, all of which harmonize well as a whole. The work of decorating and hanging has been a one-man undertaking, Mr. Evans having, unaided and, I might add, unhampered, carried it out alone. His energy and taste— two qualities that are not always combined in the same individual—have united in making his work a success. He grieved that the Jury of Selection had accepted so many pictures, although the number totals only two hundred and eighty-four. Indeed, there is no saying what Mr. Evans might have done, simply with the view of bettering his scheme of wall-decoration, with thirty or forty frames had he been entrusted with quite autocratic power.

THE internationality of the show is very apparent. The quickest glance round the gallery reveals the brilliant, big, convincing Austrian work; the dainty, sympathetic French pictures; the versatile, thoughtful and original contingent from America; and the English photographs, for which, alas, good reader, I have no adjectives left! But to particularize. There are fourteen pictures from Vienna, distributed amongst five men. Dr.