Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 6.djvu/735

Rh Nevertheless, it is this very circumstance that throws such immense difficulties in the way of taking good photographic portraits. Many persons by no means wish that their characters should be correctly given. The rascal wishes to appear an honorable man in his picture; tottering old men desire to appear young, foppish, and lively; the maid-servant plays the fine lady in the atelier; the tradesman's daughter would be a court lady, the street-sweeper a gentleman. Thus the picture serves them only as a means of flattering their personal vanity; and, in order that these people may appear very noble and distinguished, they put on a Sunday's dress, often borrowed and a very bad fit. They practise at home, moreover, before their looking-glass, in the presence of papa, mamma, wife, or lover, impossible attitudes in an artistic point of view. Even cultivated persons are not exempt from these absurdities. Thorwaldsen relates of Byron, who gave him a séance, “He sat down opposite to me, but assumed, immediately I commenced, a perfectly different expression. I called his attention to this. ‘That is the true expression of my face,’ replied Byron. ‘Indeed,’ I rejoined, and then made his portrait exactly as I wished. All persons declared my bust to be an excellent likeness. But Lord Byron exclaimed, ‘The bust does not resemble me; I look much more unhappy.’ The fact was, that at that time he wished to look intensely miserable,” adds Thorwaldsen. The photographer is even in a worse case. If Byron had come to a photographer, and had presented his face of misery to the camera, what could the photographer have done? He is unfortunately dependent on the model, and many models leave him in the lurch at the critical moment, often not intentionally, but from nervousness or inadvertence. Much depends here on the influence of the photographer, who must know how to control his sitters with courtesy; but many portraits fail without any fault on his part. The author has often witnessed how persons of his acquaintance, at the moment of being taken, assume quite a strange expression without being in the least aware of it.

There are still more characteristic cases of photographic inaccuracy which cannot be attributed to the models. Let us suppose that a photographer, stimulated by the beautiful pictures of Claude, Schirmer, and Hildebrandt, wished to photograph a sunset. He evidently can only expose his plate for a moment to the dazzling bright sun. What sort of a picture is the result? A round white blotch and some shining clouds around it. That is all that appears clearly. All objects in the landscape—trees, houses, and men—have had too short an exposure, and form a black mass. There, where the eye clearly distinguishes road, village, forest, and meadow, it sees in the photograph nothing but a dark patch without any outline. Is such a picture true? Even the most fanatical enthusiast of photography will not dare maintain this.

Such cases, where violent contrasts of light and shade make the production of a correct picture quite impossible, are countless in