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As in painting, abstract photographic experiments seem destined not to replace realism, but to teach it new tricks. One of the paradoxes of photography is the fact that never does life seem more unreal than when the realistic camera comes closest to it: when Harold Edgerton photographed a drop of milk falling into a saucer, it came out looking like a crown, and when Edward Weston shot the heart of an artichoke, it looked like a modernistic abstraction.
For the Printed Page. Young photographers seem jaded by technical perfection, regard stark effects that were considered shattering a decade or two ago merely as snapshots. Says Edward Steichen: "We hate clarity, and want feeling in what we photograph. We think that there is a deadly monotony in technical procedure . . . Anyone can take pictures, but we need at least 200 years before photography really gets good."
The majority of good professional U.S. photographers work for the printed page. Journalism at its best has found room for both clarity and feeling. It accepts such disparate artists as the lucky amateur who happens to be on the scene of interesting events (e.g., the story in the current LIFE on the student riots at Ames, Iowa was shot almost entirely by amateurs); as well as a professional such as W. Eugene Smith, a chronic agonizer ("I am constantly torn") who traveled 7,500 miles to find the right locale for his Spanish Village (1951), shot 500 negatives from which 17 were used.
The printed page is perhaps where photography is truly at home. It seems too restless for museum walls. Says Old Pro Irving Penn: "The photographer belongs to the age of the subway, high-speed cars and tall buildings. His picture is made to be seen amid the haste of contemporary life. Some real folk art appears in journalism or in advertising. A picture that sells a cake of soap can be art too."
How Good the Amateur? By last count, there are 55,000 professional photographers in the U.S., and 35 million amateurs. Of these, about 28 million are "casual," 5,000,000 are "serious" and 2,000,000 are "expert." The casual amateur is the one who takes a picture of his baby from 20 feet away, forgets to wind his film, and cannot tell a thyratron from a réseau.† He is looked down on by experts, but it is he who provides the vast ground swell of enthusiasm for photography, and he has helped pile up the statistics of photography's tremendous growth:
¶ 27 million U.S. families own cameras, as many as have cars, more than have telephones or TV sets (9,300,000 of them have two cameras; 1,500,000 have four or more). In 1941 only 20 million families had cameras.
¶ This year amateurs are spending well over $100 million on developing and printing, as against $20 million in 1940. ¶ The photographic industry will net an estimated $700 million, against $126 million in 1939. The lion's share, an estimated 65%, will go to Eastman, the rest to Ansco, Du Pont, and nearly 200 smaller camera and equipment manufacturers.