7
Kansas University Weekly.
397
But apart from the weakness which attaches itself to mere collection, one surrounds oneself with a group of photo-celebrities and friends with whom one has cultivated a mild or strenuous form of hero-worship. If from a sense of the artistic and the beautiful alone one gives a prominent place to a beautiful picture, I think he is pardonable, even though the subject be not the dearest friend. But then if he is an ordinary person he will not give up the front row to beauty alone. Even though your best friends be as ugly as nature and civilization know how to make them, you will not deny them the most expensive or elaborate frame, though you will of course study the congruities of decorative designs. If I were going to arrange my pictures chiefly for strangers eyes,—I am not a person to be presented with photographs—I should decorate my room not for the delectation of visitors but to please my own fancy. There is more real joy in seeing an ugly staunch old friend with protruding ears and inartistic mouth staring down at us as we sit at our study table, than in being watched by the most perfect type of feminine beauty, as to whom—
"If she be not fair to me,!
What care I how fair she be?"
All we ask for our photographs is that they should be true representations of our friends, and as an addition, in an artistic setting. In this day of Kodaks and supersensitive films the science of photography is brought into the reach of everyone. The little Kodak, carried inconspiciously in one's pocket, is daily brought into use catching our friends unawares, and therefore in their most natural moods and expression. The cheapness of material, and the ease of execution, since, if we choose we need only to press the button, have made it possible that we can avail ourselves of the choicest imaginable assortment of photographs of our friends which not only reveal the physical person and an expression made for the occasion, but images as well the life, disposition, and the soul. If our friends are, to put it midly, plain, then let the photographer show that plainness and not try his hand in producing a fancy
picture. "Paint me as I am, wart and all," said Cromwell; and we too would have, if not the warts, the real characteristics of our friends. Yes, the face reveals the soul when the subject is not trying to control his features, and thus again the little Kodak stamps with greater value our entire collection. We do not care so much for pictures in which the subject has sat merely as a model—as a stimulant to the fancy of the artist: or if we do we shall buy them as pictures and not as portraits. We may idealize one another in art and fiction, if we have qualities that lend themselves to idealization; but when we ask for a portrait, let us see that we secure the living expression and facial delineations free from the retoucher's pencil. Let us see the head free from the iron frame which used to clamp it into position before the camera. If one values the photograph of one's friends, it is because they remind one of the living being in a well-known mood. We do not ask that the best points of the features be selected and represented as being a little more perfect than Nature made them, or that the hair should be brushed more carefully than usual, or that an every day garment be exchanged for a new one, or that our friend should wear an expression that is insisted on at that particular studio where he sits, and which is not worn at home. We do not care to remember how immovable or statuesque our friend can be when her head is fastened and held at an unnatural angle for the sake of catching the light. We want the real article that we can go and talk to in fancy when we are lonely and one that will seem just as real to us in ten years hence as it does to-day. Let the artistic work in the picture be such as to set off the subject and not to take attention from it, and lastly let the settings be of such a nature as not to be antiquated at once.
R. L. NETHERTON.
You can ride your horse to water,
But you cannot make him drink,
You can "ride" your little "pony,"
But you cannot make him think.—Ex.
That "history repeats itself," A saying oft I've heard;
But when in class I'm called upon,
It never says a word.—Ex.