Alfred Horsley Hinton Quotes

Art seeks ever to conceal the means by which its effects are produced and the method in which the work is wrought.

The moment the eye perceives that the picture is produced by other than the professed means, the effect, the appeal to the imagination, is disturbed.

The texture of the printed image is of such peculiar character that neither brush or liquid paint seem capable of imitating it.

Both with the negative in position and subsequently without it, every part of a large print is, maybe, thus printed in, piece by piece, a large print often occupying me two or three days.

There is a difference in printing greater depth to any portion with the negative and shading down without the negative. In the former case we get a deeper and stronger image, still preserving to a great extent the relative contrasts between the lights and shades in that portion. This is not always what we require. In order to concentrate attention upon that is, to emphasize, some particular spot, it may be desirable to shade down and flatten some portion.

...let it be remembered that as photography is our chosen medium, then if photography unaided will give us the effect we want there is no especial virtue in altering it.

In such a picture the artist may depart from actual fact, from what actually was, so long as he does not exceed what might have been.

He (the photographer) has practically created a new thing out of materials gathered from nature; upon a foundation of fact he has allowed his imagination to build up an entirely fictitious scene, and the truth of the effect will depend upon how far his perceptions have been trained by studying nature at various times, so as to know how things might look under certain circumstances.

Probably every photographer has at times found it convenient to print one part of a negative more than another or lias covered another portion during printing, thus deliberately making those portions lighter or darker, as the case may be.

Inferior as a mechanical printing method for ordinary photographic purposes, the gum process may for a time at least be regarded as standing apart for pictorial purposes, because the large amount of personal control which must be exercised before it can be said to show distinct advantages over other methods implies that the controlling hand must be guided by an artist that is, a man of such large instinctive artistic taste that one can hardly conceive that he would be able to produce a better result by painting, and without the use of photography at all, were he to devote the same skill and endeavour to the employment of brush or pencil, instead of photographic appliances.

We are then brought to consider Platinotype, which, on the whole, may be regarded as the most suitable for general pictorial work. Its power of rendering relative tones and atmosphere is perhaps unequalled, whilst, although every one who has used it has sometimes wished that the undeveloped image were more visible, yet the pale, ghost-like print made by the light is very much better than nothing at all, and, indeed, may often be quite sufficient to guide us in our endeavours to control the action of light in a manner to be shortly described.

The objection to the shiny, highly polished surface of albumen and gelatine papers is that, besides the fact that the surface reflects false and disturbing lights, the very polish and gloss has an artificial appearance which, from its very superfine character, irresistibly reminds us of its origin and nature.

But the quality of the result obtained by using a pin-hole to which its advocates attach most importance is the suppression of sharp focus over the whole image, no one plane being more sharply focused than another.

It is often difficult and well-nigh impossible, when using the lens, to get all planes in moderate focus without getting one or some part excessively so, and similarly, if we avoid excessive sharpness in each and every part, some planes, such as the extreme distance or immediate foreground, so broken up as to destroy form and structure. Then it is that the pin-hole, with its equal focus in all planes and at any focal length, seems to recommend itself; but if it be desired to emphasize any object, by introducing more detail there than elsewhere, then the uniform sharpness of the pin-hole image fails us.

The chief characteristic of the pin-hole photograph is that we get a general suppression of focus in all parts the picture is nowhere quite sharp.