June, 1936

Should portraitists attempt to educate the public? Should we give them the photographs they want or the photographs we want them to have? I have noticed that many people nowadays prefer enlargements of heads snapped by amateurs in a seaside or garden group. The general belief is that portraits taken under these conditions are thoroughly natural. They are but that is all.

A contest in which photographs of still life become the subjects for stories is one of the interesting ideas which Stein, the Paris photographer, has been trying.

“As one walks along,” he explains, “one frequently sees old and discarded objects abandoned in the street. Frequently these can be used as subjects for interesting photographs in which the subject itself becomes unimportant and in which the composition, the play of light and shade become primeval.”