WOMAN AND THE CAMERA. SOME OF THE DEVOTEES OF AMATEUR PHOTOGRAPHY. How the Photographic Mania Comes onMrs. Platt Detective-Katherine Weed Barnes' Twenty-six Cameras -Women Artisans Who Take Pletures. It is impossible to tell over night who may be attacked by the photographic mania. You mAy go to sleep meditating peacefully on the prospect of a cool wave and wake up with thoughts of film rolls and snap shots and derelopers and the alleged ease of pressing the button while a benficent providence does all the rest scurrying like so many microbes through your brain. The virus works with unbelievable rapidity. In ten minutes you see an iceman who would make a capital character study for n villain. In two hours you are listening engerly to instructions about focus and exposure. In six hours you are training confidently on a Brighton Beach belle emerging from the water in n wet bathing suit. In twelve hours you are tilting the pan hopefully in an improvised dark room, most likely the bathroom with blankets pinned over the windows. In twelve hours and five minutes you are examining your first plate nervously by the light of your red Intern. In twelve hours and six minutes you are exclaiming: Fogged!" in accents of wild despair. In twelve hours and ten minutes you are drinking lime juice and water, a la Beau Brummel, and explaining to your interested family that "it's curious what 211 amount of interest some people will take in such things.' Such is the run of an ordinary attack of the disease, acute but brief. Some people have it harder. Mrs. Thomas C. Platt has had it very hard indeed. This lady was one of the first victims of the camera epidemic. It was four years ago or thereabouts that she began to use her husband as a model and immortalized the ex-Senator in all sorts of dignified and undignitied positions and occupations. When she got a fine series of views of him loading stones on a barrow, wheeling the barrow and laying a walk, somebody suggested, "Labor vote, transparencies, use in campaign! "Londs are too small," said Tom Platt, astutely, "make the workingman grin.' The pictures of immigrants that Mrs. Platt took at the Barge Office and 00 the Burgunda a month ago and other steamers more recently have turned out very nicely. She has been down the bay with a labor inspector and interpreter half a dozen times, and has now a collection of turbaned Syrians and chunky little Italian girls in long earrings, and tall and stalwart Irish girls, and weather-beaten old women from the Welch mines and picturesque Norwegians, Hungarians and representatives of every nation that sends its surplus population to our shores that is surpassed only by the photographic art gallery of Mrs. Bruce Ismay. The immigrants have sbown themselves willing to pose for her, once satisfied she wAs not aiming at them a new sort of dynamite gun, but - on her last visit a Russian Jew in n long cloak of the hue of his long gray beard insisted with so much dignity that *his face should not be stolen," that Mrs. Platt gave her word she would destroy the negative. The leonine old Russian may have been looking forward to the day when his descendants shonld be the Vanastorbills of the twentieth century and object to any record of their origin. Mrs. Bruce Ismay photographs shipboard life, as a name connected so intimately with the Inman line would suggest, and has perpetrated groups that would make the fortune of an artist if he could reproduce in color the faces of some of these new citizens of our new land. I am told that the Battery under the old regime at Castle Garden fascinated her, and that many of her most unique pictures were obtained by snap shots nt the " lately landed," issuing single file upon the asphalt pavement, looking about them curiously and in wonderment, seated on the park benches looking over the water or volubly greeting half-Americanized relatives. The women who photograph do so with all sorts of cameras, from that which is sold for 25 cents and takes a single picture before the exhaustion of its usefulness, through a pin hole instead of a lens, up to outfits costing hundreds of dollars. There is one young women, and a very graceful and dainty one, whose father has many skekels, and who, when she goes off on n photographic excursion is followed by a negro servant, who carries her tripod and adjusts it with great flourish of elbows and conspicuousness of testh when she has chosen her point of view. When the exposure has been made, with a I tink we got 'er dat time, sunh, missy,' he packs up the impedimenta and journeys on. It may be well to add that the young woman in spite of this pomp and circumstance of photography, takes artistically composed pictures. Most women bitten with the craze 118e the handy little portable cameras, or detectives, but even without the services of a colored porter there are a number who manage the tripod variety. Last summer at one of the Seidl Society's meetings at Brighton Beach there was n pretty scene when Mrs. Elizabeth Cody Stanton consented to be placed in position and was photographed by a daughter of Olive Thorne Miller. Mrs. Miller's family seems to be photographic, for she has two daughters who are given to shutting themselves up in dark rooms, but who cannot, with all their 'snapshot' " work, get very close views of the sky feathered songsters that are their mother's especial stndy. One of the most successful women photographers left America for Russia a month ago. Mrs. Sergins Schewitsch, who was the beautiful Helene von Racowitza and whose career has been as romantic as that of any living woman, had the face of one to whom life had brought contentment, but showed a restless energy that did not disdain an outlet in half a dozen fads, photography being the most zealously followed. Her specialty waS the portraiture of children, and I remember chatting with her one bright morning in the park when a -capped nurse came along with a Kate " Greenway urchin that could just toddle. Will you lend me that baby? The aristocratic nurse looked up at the tall, blue-eyed blonde woman and stared. "I only want to take its picture.' The stare began to spell itself glare. "Come, *little one," and Mrs. Schewitsch conquered the baby's heart with a smile and an outstretched hand. The nurse had to follow willy-nilly, and for half an hour the woman who played so strange n part in the history of German socialism snt on a rock a little away from the track of promenaders and studied the baby as it tumbled on the grass, catching it in all sorta of fatarmed and chubby-kneed attitudes. A scientific photographer is the little darkskinned Mme. Alice Le Plongeon who spent so many years in Yucatan with her husband, studying the relics of lost races. It is a common enough thing with amatenrs to call themselves photographers though they do nothing more than make the exposure, sending plates or film rolls to the studios of professionals to be developed and printed from. But Mme. Le Plongeon struggled with photography in the depths of tropical wildernesses without the amateur's most ordinary conveniences, making pictures with wet plates which she herself prepared often under the most unfavorable and disheartening conditions. Her work is wonderfully strong and even in its excellence, and to sit in her library studio, den, by whatever name you choose to call her workshop -is to look round on ruins of temples, monuments, statues, inscriptions until you anticipate the feelings of Macauley's New Zealander who mny one day stand on the wreck of London bridge and specuinte on the forgotten civilization of the British Isles. Mme. Lo Plongeon makes her own lantern slides from her photographs and when she lectures, her husband manages the stereopticon, she performing the same service for him at his lectures. Miss Katherine Weed Barnes goes into amateur photography with whole-souled enthusiasm. Miss Barnes is a niece of Thurlow Weed, and having plenty of money she does not stint herself in the number or the costly appliances of her cameras. If she wants to find ont if she likes n thing she buys it and tries it. Thus it comes about that she owns twenty-six different photographic cameras and has fitted up a studio that wins exclamations of admiration and despairing envy from its visitors. Miss Barnes has paved the way for the admission of her sex to photographic societies. In photographic exhibitions she has stood consistently and logically against the absurd ladies' prizes maintaining that women exhibitors should not be set off in a class by themselves to compete only with one another, but that men and women should contend for without sex distinetions, on the same footing, the regular prizes. She has lately become one of the editors of the American Amateur Photographer. There is no 1186 in mixing much in the company of amateur photographers unless you share their enthusiasm. Get half a dozen of them together and they will begin abont " pyro" and iron developer" and " bromide prints" and " color values," and their language will depart. so far from every day English that you speculate whether they are talking Sanskrit or Choctaw. This is how it happens with some of the women artists who use photography as an adjunet tosketching. Miss Agnes Abbott, for example, who has done many good things both as flower and Inndscape painter, makes considerable use of the camern to give her in a minute details which it would take her an hour to bring | otit with pencil. At her country home in summer she sketches a scene in broad outline which strikes her as an attractive subject for a painting and then photographs this fence corner or the way that shrub leans over the brook or a dozen and one other items which are so many memoranda helps to her memory. The wife of another artist is a good deal of photographer. Mr. J. Wells Champney uses the camern, and Mrs. Lizzie W. Champney uses it quite as successfully. With its help she has preserved interesting records of the growth of her children, picturing them preferably while nt play. Instantaneous pictures of children are fascinating photographic recreations. People with detectives: enke them pushing the lawn mower, riding picka-back on papa's shoulders. "A little boy was taken the other evening by n flash light at his mother's knee. At prayers," she called it. Wasn't praying," protested the honest urchin "just having my picture taken. In photographic families, it may be noted, the children get well ased to posing. One sweetfaced little girl is taken every Christmas morning surrounded by her toys. Min after years she will have proof positive of the great number and variety of her childhood's playthings. The Photographic Section of the Brooklyn Institute is getting up excursions this summer to different points in the suburbs, and these are attended by quite a number of women with their cameras. Miss Mary Newton, whose mother is Chairman of the Executive Committee of Sorosis and who is in her tastes an artist, is one of the enthusiasts, and Mrs. Cornelia Hood, who is now part owner of Miss Mary F. Seymour's Business Woman's Journal, is another, The detective is becoming quite a useful article of the newspaper woman's stock in trade. Miss Elizabeth Bisland is a clever photographer and Miss Eta Thackeray, who is a relative of the novelist, has done considerable work with the camera. Miss Alice Stone Blackwell has photographic tastes, though she indulges in them for amusement and not for the benefit of the Woman's Journal. Photography seems to have an especial attraction for actresses. It is one of Clara Morris' hobbies and her fine horses are her favorite subjects. Ada Rehan got a camera this spring, though how much she is doing with it I do not know. She ought to find plenty of picture material and plenty of people of congenial tastes in London. A woman to be sympathized with is Mrs. Cleveland. She is rather given to hobbies but is shy of indulging her tastes, because everything she does brings on her so many eyes. She is fond of the violin, but after her music mistress was interviewed her enthusiasm appreciably declined. She is fond of the camera but does not like to be seen with one in her hand. Still she has made a fair number of snap shots and is probably making more this summer at Marion. A sense of the humorous crops out in her choice of subjects. A taste for the camera once fully developed there is no telling where it will lead a person. It will take you to Alaska to picture Indians, as it did Mrs. Platt, or through the vale of Cashmere famed for many things but more especially for shawls, as it did a woman who has wandered twice round the globe in search of material." It will take you up into the Catskills where photography is regular sport with the Onteora colony or to Asbury Park where the confirmed photographer has no respect for the cloth, but takes an exhorter in full tide of admonition. It may even take you, as it did my nearest friend, to a penitentiary, where she photographed a poor fellow in the prison dentist's chair in the act of having a tooth extracted. Great is photography. Its charms are many nnd its claims, when it has its grip on -you, inexorable. ELIZA PUTNAM HEATON. -Copyright POINTS FOR LITERARY ASPIRANTS. A Talk With a Professional Reader - The Manuscripts of Well-known Writers. Some skepticism may be pardoned regarding the truth of the sensational story which bas been flashed under the oceans, and is now surprising the literary world, to the effect that Robert Louis Stevenson has picked out a Samoan mountain slope as a permanent home and will at once begin to build a house. To whatever extent the gifted author of " Jekyll and Hyde" may indulge his passion for studying wild and rantamiliar life in the remote nooks of the globe to which his yacht carries him, it seems Improbable that his numerous literary engagements can admit of his choosing, as a home, a place far rethoved from the centres of thought and study-hundreds of leagues, indeed, from the nearest literary conveniences and secluded from the world's activity and progress. The writing, serials, sketches &c., for which he is under contract are sufficient to occupy at least a twelvemonth, and the total romüneration for the work is estimated at $30,000, or which sum a New York literary weekly is to pay, $10,000 for a serial story. Curiosity is allowable concerning the autograph of a writer whose pen-marks bring him such remuneration. Mr. Stevenson's signature is a disappointment to those who believe that an author's personality shows itself in his handwriting. It is small, fluent, delicate and almost graceful; "indicating none of his weird originality in writing and none of the forceful disregard for conventionality which the author shows in his speech' and his dress. Observers who believe that a man mirror8 himself to some extent in his handwriting could find many instances to support their theory in the M88 which come before the eye of a professional reader," and not a few instances which would puzzle their faith. In any event they would learn much of what the curious public is ever eager to learn. Harold Frederick has a bold, simple and easy handwriting which is a joy to the heart of the professional " reader," and the writing of James Parton is like unto it. Elizabeth Stuart Phelps his a quick and nervous hand and her manuscript is filled with erasures and interlineations. Julian Hawthorne's copy" averages eighteen words to a line (his copy paper being seven inches wide) and is written with a peculiar violet ink which flashes into old gold or deadens to purple in certain lights. Edgar Fawcett handwriting is plain and full. Frank Dempster Sherman prints his poems with a fine pen, forming beautifully delicate letters, his manuscript being almost 88 delicate and lucid as his verses. The same could be said of Clinton Scollard'a pen products. Mra. Amelia E. Barr's writing is large and Arm and angular, yet delicate. Judge Tourgee uses ink which is like Julian Hawthorne's, only more 80. Mra. Madeline Vinton Dablgreen'8 chirography is massive and gothic with lofty arches and eky aspiring Anna Katharine Green's handwriting is delicate, graceful, imaginative and sotnifashionable. Writers who send in several manuscripts ih the seine enclosure make a big mistake," was the information recently vouchsafed to me by a reader for one of the weeklies, It is much better for a writer to take a little additional trouble and mail the articles at intervals of 8 day or two. Few readers care to recommend more that one out of four or five short stories sent at one time by the same author, and -it is frequently the case that two or three of those same stories might be recommended if a week elapsed between the redelpt of each story. When an assortment of short stories, poems, sketches and comics is received, the impression given is distinctly unfavorable, The Idea of the sender is too boldly evident. * Perhaps I'll make a strike out of the lot!" is easily read between the lines. Many publishers require their * readers" to keep an elaborate record and index of all articles submitted, and the work of such " readera" is increased disproportionately when a job lot of storios, poets, &o., is received. As for serials, it de in most cases comparatively simple to judge of them. Just now the magnzines and the higher grade weeklles have fewer serials than was the case fifteen or twenty years ago. at which time some of the weeklles used to print as many as six serials in each issue. To-day, however, most of the superior periodicals use only two serials, some of them only one serial. Consequently, only a serial of special brilliance has any show of being accepted. Accordingly, the niche being 80 small, most serials proffered are rejected off hand. As a novel published serially must be in a serial form (that it be divided into installments nearly equal in length, and have a rattling old-school suspenseful climax), and as many new writers do not write in pursuance of this requisite, many novels which would be Baleable and bright in book form are thrown out by " readers" for magazines and weekiles. Above all, a serial must have a hair-lifting frat installment. It must lose no time in description and analysis, but must get down at once to action; the description and analysis may come along about the third or fourth installment. But the fact is that a serial by an unknown thor has not one chance in thirty of acceptance. Most publishers have stored in their antes anywhere from ten to twenty-five or thirty serials by standard popular authors, and these may have been awaiting Insertion anywhere from six months to three or four years or more, With such n wealth of serial fletion on hand and with lessening demand for fletion on the part of readers, it is not strange that magazine publishers stora be reluctant to accept a serial, no matter how excellent, from an unknown genius. Just now magazines and weeklies are on the lookout for short sketches of travel, adventure, exploration, &c. which are capable of bizarre and artistio Illustration. Strange life and remote nooks of the earth, picturesque features of metropolitan life, higher phases of sports, religious practices, &c., in fact, anything of interest which can be illustrated from photographs or by the fancy or a creative and poetical artist, have a better show for acceptance to-day than Action. By the way, amateur photography la destined to play a dictatorial part in the weeklies. A series of good photographe will noat ad in• ferior article, the editors touching up the menuscript, and, it necessary; giving it to a litorary hack to rewrite. Regarding poetry : As might be expected, most of the verses which come in are evolved from feminine cella, There is a craze for metrical confections such as rondeaux, roundels, villavelles. triolets, quatrains, bultrains and other fanciful products in the line of vera de societe. Such things generally begin the round by being malled to Life and the weekly society papers, and on being returned with thanks, are sent to any and every periodical with which they are supposed to have a show. They refer, learnedly to Arcady, Eros, Helolse, Jullet, Amaryllis, and otherwiso show erudition respecting matters erotic. The most matter de submitted in the winter months, the winter crop being about double that sunimer. Ordinarily an article which 18 Intended for publication in a certain issue of weekly should. it it la to be be in six or seven weeks before that issue; 1f it, does not need Illustration it should be in a month beforehand. D. D. BIDWELLA Mr. Beckton, of Plant City, Fla,, has been engaged in catching and selling rabbits to Ybor Olty the past year, and during that time, within an area or six miles square, has caught 1,900 rabbits. They sell readily at 25 cents gaula, a I it |
