PICTORIAL STEREOGWHY 139NATURAL AND PICTORIAL BEAuTY.-The beginner in photogra-
phy who has ambitions toward the pictorial, makes endless nega-
tives of “perfectly beautiful” scenes, and almost without exception
the prints bring only disappointment. He then starts to study the
rules of pictorial composition, and slowly he learns that very
rarely does the beautiful original produce a beautiful picture. On
the contrary, the prints he eventually exhibits will be made from
subject matter which would be passed by the casual observer with-
out the slightest suspicion that it had pictorial possibilities.
Pictorialism is based upon a set of wholly artificial standards.
No one can ever claim that there is any beauty in a water faucet
or acouple of eggs upon a kitchen drain board, yet pictures of
such subjects have been made: pictures which no discerning critic
can say are not beautiful. Thus the artificiality is not the result
of preciousness, but has a very solid foundation. We are not
dealing with certain schools of thought or faddism. It is a solid,
inescapable fact that many of our most beautiful scenes sink into
insignificance when photographed, and that many of our most
beautiful outdoor photographs have been produced only because
the photographer has developed his power of camera discernment.
This is true because the values of an object in space are not its
values when reduced to a plane. In the planar picture mutual
effect of two objects distantly separated in space, but adjacent in
the plane, must be carefully considered. Hence it is inevitable
that in any planar picture the values must be decidedly different
from those of the original.
In stereo this is not true. The values of the original are repro-
duced in the stereogram, hence the stereo slogan which has done
so much to make it popular, “In stereo you get exactly what you
saw,” and that is true. The stereogram is a truthful reproduction
of the original, which is never true of the planar reproduction.
The beautiful scene almost always yields a beautiful stereogram.
However, this is apparent to the beginner more than to the ex-
perienced photographer. The writer has been deeply amused by
the criticism of stereograms offered by pictorialists. It is quite
obvious that such criticism has been made while studying the
print directly, not the stereogram in a viewer. Such criticism is not
only unjust, but its absurdity is manifest to anyone, skilled or lay-
man, who hears the criticism while studying the stereogram in a