KinSource - Tale of the Week - Artistic Results in Photography

KinSource

Minnesota Tales

The Progress (Minneapolis), February 18, 1905, p. 4

Artistic Results in Photography.

What an altogether charming business it must have been in the time of our grandparents and their ancestors to "have one's picture taken." It involved a series of sittings in your very best attire, light and spirits before an artist entrusted with the great task to immortalize your features, both those that were inherited and those individual with you. Yet the daguerrotype was hailed as a miraculous invention, a blessing to humanity. Our industrial age was the very epoch for such a discovery and quickly developed it into photography of marvelous resources.

But in our age there is a strong reaction felt against the machine work of every description that oppresses the spirits of artistic tastes and inclination. While there is no art that can produce such wonderful "likeness" as photography the writer, like good many others, has often wondered why is was not possible to render the artistic effect of light and shade in a photograph as they are seen in an engraving or drawing. In every art there are pathfinders, experimentalists and it is quite evident that photographers of the progressive class must for years have been studying to accomplish this, have been trying to produce something that did not have the ordinary mechanical appearance that we have been accustomed to tolerate in attempted portraits by photography.

I believe the objections to the mechanical photographic portrait have been overcome by an artist, B. Lyons Benson of Minneapolis. Mr. Benson has recently opened a photographic studio on Nicollet avenue in a Dutch house which stands on the corner of Tenth street. I had the pleasure of visiting his studio recently. It is absolutely different from anything of the kind in the West. The place looks as inobtrusive and reserved from without as within. The color and lines of the interior decoration are Flemish. The feeling of privacy on entering is pleasing and will appeal to all who are of an artistic temperament or exclusive tastes and habits.

The beautiful work done by Mr. Benson certainly deserves the continued support of the connousseurs of the Northwest. Mr. Benson is not an artist in name only. He is quite familiar not only with the various classical schools of portrait painting which makes him an expert on light effects of an exquisite order but he is also a landscape painter of ability. Some of his studies painted from our lakes and glens in different hours of the day show how deeply he has penetrated into the mysteries of light and shade.

In his photgraphic work, Mr. Benson is highly exacting. He spends infinite work and care on every picture under his hand, eliminating all the mechanical traits and adding artistic detail. The result is remarkable and gives the inpression desired which makes you forget that it is a photo you have before you.

VICTOR NILSSON.