Page:The Polygraphic Apparatus.djvu/16

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li the purpose of making Dagnerreotype plates lit for being printed in the common press. Photography or light-printing could, with the exception of being applied for the production of portraits, a long time obtain no more extensive field for activity, although a great number of people made use of the photographic apparatus. This splendid department of art, which has a far superior tendency, has, from the very beginning, been made use of for a limited purpose, and is even to this day applied by some artists for the sole purpose of earning money, in such a manner that through those defective productions almost every higher aim has been suppressed. This did more injury to the art of Daguerreotyping than it derived benefit from its rapid extension in the above named manner. The same was the case with the photographic pictures on paper. which were innuenced by another disadvantage, namely that they required a painter, who, generally speaking, from individual mis- conception or from want of practice, entirely spoiled those intima- tions which the light had given in a defective manner, or which the paper had received in too faint a manner, whereby the like- ness of the picture was generally injured. It often happened that the photographer was no distinguished painter, or that the latter was no photographer. In such cases the necessary agreement ~—— or rather the indispensable fundamental principle of judgment -—- was wanting; and thus it happens that productions are exhibited here and there in public places, which, if the splendid art of photography carried not within it a higher destiny and a more extensive applimtion, must have destroyed it long since. Fortu- nately some distinguished photographers trod on a different path. They copied architectural monuments, statues, even landscapes etc., and by this means they did one step in advance of the unfathomable pit of their activity, and it is owing to this extensive application that the existence of photography will always be safe, and even reach a higher aim than all other multiplying methods. Photo- graphy designs the universe and all that is contained in it; it