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Kansas University Weekly.
Why not go back to the time of the Vicar of Wakefield, and be taken as his wife and daughters were painted, in classical costumes and in classical guise? Generally speaking, it is not a photo of our friends clothes or millinery that we want, but a reproduction of the features. The dress is but a set-off to the whole, a necessary finish which cannot be eliminated; but since they endanger the life of the photograph as an adornment for our mantle-piece could we not conform to some garb which has a distinctive and recognized characteristic which time cannot destroy? Let us go back, if you like, to the flowing drapery of the Greeks and the Roman toga, to Hamlet's suit of black—excellent for the purposes of photography—or to the picturesque costume of the Restoration. Then the features of the subject will claim our whole attention, and the dress will stand for nothing more than an artistic setting, like the frame in which the whole is enclosed.
It is hard indeed in these days to have a gallery photo taken which exhibits ourselves as we are. If taken as we dress to-day, it is not as we appear next season if the picture reveals much of our apparel, and when fashion has in capricious chopping changed the check for the stripes, the photo must be sentenced to the company of the others, long since hidden safely away. Here is the portrait of a very good friend taken some fifteen years ago. He has a little hat stuck jauntily on his head, incipient whiskers running down each cheek, and the special expression on his face which the older photographers used to demand. He is standing up, and is taken at full length with crossed legs, his hand resting carelessly—really very carefully—on the back of a chair. But the good fellow no longer appears like that. If it was once his misfortune to dress and smile in that manner it is cruel to remember it against him.
Look around your room now, and run your eyes over the number of photographs you are not ashamed to submit to the gaze of your visitor—for this is an age when the photo has escaped from the imprisonment of the plush
and celluloid album and is pressed into decorative service on our walls and mantles and screens—arranged more, one must admit, with an eye to art and effect, than on the principles of affection. Here is a photograph of a sweet little girl of ten, and one of the latest additions to your collection. You desire to give it prominence because it is pretty from a pictorial and artistic point of view. In another ten years time you will hardly be willing to show the portrait to the original and remind her how she looked in 1896. Is it possible that by and by that pretty picture will have to be buried away in that deep box along with the tintypes and yellow paints of the sixties and with the portraits of temporary celebrities?
Putting aside however the caprice of fashion which has hitherto played such havoc in our photograph galleries, and allowing for both an improved taste in dress, which shall make our present costumes be tolerated in the midst of a change, and a decided advance in the photographer's art, what is the reason of the extensive giving and accepting of photos—which is so much the fashion? Do you mean to say seriously that every portrait you have troubled yourselves to frame and find room for represents as much space in your heart as it does on your mantle piece? Is there not a number of persons whose photos you exhibit whom you would not care two straws if you did not set your eyes on again? No doubt there is as much of the collector's mania in storing photographs as there used to be in sticking stamps into an album. If, by chance, you hear that an acquaintance has had his or her photograph taken, by natural impulse you seek to possess yourself of one. Very often it is out of real interest in the individual and it is sometimes, perhaps, that one likes to appear to one's self as well as to others as a person of many friends, and a good photographic exposition carries with it this suggestion. Of course, if you are securing a portrait which is in itself a pretty picture, your excuse frames itself, and you are merely exercising the same taste for the beautiful as when you buy a set of scenery photos, or college souvenirs.