At least as frustrating as photography’s inability to reproduce movement was its inability to reproduce color, as is evident in another 1890 letter: "I snapped some Kodaks, almost hoping they would fail, for without color such scenes are caricatures" (Letters 3: 354). Again and again, Adams returned to the way in which the photograph distorts its subject: “The scenery is . . . spoiled by photographing. The softness of lights and colors, the motion of the palms, the delicacy and tenderness of the mornings and evenings, the moisture of the atmosphere, and all the other qualities which charm one here, are not to be put into a photograph” (Letters 3: 307). Adams’s mounting frustration is here manifested in the very structure of his prose. The descriptive phrases-all clearly positive-are piled one on top of another in a climactic order, functioning as a compound subject which serves to identify and particularize “all [that] . . . charm[s] one here.” Yet this compound subject is anticlimactically undermined by the negative (“not”), which immediately follows upon the copulative (“are”), thereby serving to specify the absolutely negative effect of photography.

By this point, then, photography seemed to Adams to destroy beauty rather than to create it, as he wrote to Elizabeth Cameron in 1891: “The photograph . . . seems to delight only in taking the whole beauty out of the picture” (Letters 3: 388). Interestingly, he saved his most bitter complaints for the harm done to women by the photograph: “Especially it vulgarises the women, whose charm is chiefly in their size and proportions, their lines, the freedom of their movements, the color of their skin, and their good-natured smile” (Letters 3: 307). And he wrote in similar terms to Elizabeth Cameron that “the women especially suffer, for they pose stiffly, and lose the freedom of movement and the play of feature that most attract us” (Letters 3: 298). In a later letter to Elizabeth Cameron, he wrote rather poignantly of a beautiful Tahitian woman: “I had not the heart to risk spoiling Pree’s Syrian beauty by distorting it in my camera” (Letters 3: 421). And of another, less intrinsically beautiful woman, he wrote: “Fanua is not handsome, but the photograph is peculiarly hard on her” (Letters 3: 29 1).

In “distorting” natural beauty, photography was necessarily untrue to nature, according to Adams, and it thus became associated in his mind with fraud, falsehood, lies. Merely by photographing a statue of the Buddha, then, he “perpetrated a number of libels on Buddha and Buddhism" as he reported to John Hay (Letters 3:37). Enclosing some photographs in a letter to Elizabeth Cameron, he wrote rather perversely of them that “they will give you, I know, a false impression of everything” (Letters 3: 318). And to Anna Cabot Mills Lodge, he similarly identified the photograph as a “coarse fraud” (Letters 3: 388).

For Adams, then, photography came to reside at the center of a complex of images suggestive of reductiveness, colorlessness, fixity, hardness, vulgarity, and falsehood. In its ability to reproduce literally and exactly the surface of reality while not “ca[tching] its spirit,” photography was also associated in various letters with statistics and measurements— that is, with the tools of science rather than art.

The last bit pretty much echoes the conclusion I drew in my previous post on H &D—there was a shift from qualitative questions about photography’s nature as an art into a growing acceptance of photography as a science which might provide quantitative evidence about phenomena. This article was not fresh in my mind when I came to that conclusion; in fact, this is the first time I've looked at it in around two years.

Considered from this historical perspective, Steiglitz and his circle seem more than a little anachronistic. They were concerned with the “is it art” debate rather than the “is it true” debate. Truth ultimately seems much more relevant to the acceptance of photography as a medium than any conjectures regarding artistic malleability.