Photography - A Short Story Collection

By Lewis Carroll, Aleister Crowley and Luigi Pirandello

Since its inception in the 19th Century photography has been a trusted source capturing both truth and reality. It cannot lie. Our eyes may deceive us, but the camera cannot. It is also an Art. Down through the decades this art has produced stunning images that literally capture a story whether it be in War photography, celebrity mishaps, even political downfalls and much else besides.

In this volume whilst our classic authors are at the early edge of photography’s development, they use it in ways that are both innovative and atmospheric as very often the camera and the photographer become a central part in many fascinating stories.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Miniature Masterpieces
• Release date: Feb 21, 2024
• ISBN: 9781835474341

Lewis Carroll

Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (1832-1898), better known by his pen name Lewis Carroll, published Alice's Adventures in Wonderland in 1865 and its sequel, Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There, in 1871. Considered a master of the genre of literary nonsense, he is renowned for his ingenious wordplay and sense of logic, and his highly original vision.

Book preview

Photography - A Short Story Collection

Since its inception in the 19th Century photography has been a trusted source capturing both truth and reality.  It cannot lie.  Our eyes may deceive us, but the camera cannot.  It is also an Art.  Down through the decades this art has produced stunning images that literally capture a story whether it be in War photography, celebrity mishaps, even political downfalls and much else besides. 

In this volume whilst our classic authors are at the early edge of photography’s development, they use it in ways that are both innovative and atmospheric as very often the camera and the photographer become a central part in many fascinating stories. 

Index of Contents

Photography Extraordinary by Lewis Carroll

Pickman's Model by H P Lovecraft

The Eye of the Camera by Fred M White

The Eidoloscope by Robert Duncan Milne

Photographer and Philosopher by August Strindberg

The Sapient Monkey by Headon Hill

Behind the Curtain by Gertrude Barrows Bennett writing as Francis Stevens

His Secret Sin by Aleister Crowley

With Other Eyes by Luigi Pirandello

His Dead Wife's Photograph by S Mukerji

The Man With The Roller by E G Swain

The Blue Laboratory by L T Meade

The Hair by A J Alan

Photography Extraordinary by Lewis Carroll

The recent extraordinary discovery in Photography, as applied to the operations of the mind, has reduced the art of novel-writing to the merest mechanical labour. We have been kindly permitted by the artist to be present during one of his experiments; but as the invention has not yet been given to the world, we are only at liberty to relate the results, suppressing all details of chemicals and manipulation.

The operator began by stating that the ideas of the feeblest intellect, when once received on properly prepared paper, could be developed up to any required degree of intensity. On hearing our wish that he would begin with an extreme case, he obligingly summoned a young man from an adjoining room, who appeared to be of the very weakest possible physical and mental powers. On being asked what we thought of him, we candidly confessed that he seemed incapable of anything but sleep; our friend cordially assented to this opinion.

The machine being in position, and a mesmeric rapport established between the mind of the patient and the object glass, the young man was asked whether he wished to say anything; he feebly replied Nothing. He was then asked what he was thinking of, and the answer, as before, was Nothing. The artist on this pronounced him to be in a most satisfactory state, and at once commenced the operation.

After the paper had been exposed for the requisite time, it was removed and submitted to our inspection; we found it to be covered with faint and almost illegible characters. A closer scrutiny revealed the following:

"The eve was soft and dewy mild; a zephyr whispered in the lofty glade, and a few light drops of rain cooled the thirsty soil. At a slow amble, along the primrose-bordered path rode a gentle-looking and amiable youth, holding a light cane in his delicate hand; the pony moved gracefully beneath him, inhaling as it went the fragrance of the roadside flowers: the calm smile, and languid eyes, so admirably harmonising with the fair features of the rider, showed the even tenor of his thoughts. With a sweet though feeble voice, he plaintively murmured out the gentle regrets that clouded his breast:

"Alas! she would not hear my prayer!

Yet it were rash to tear my hair;

Disfigured, I should be less fair.

"She was unwise, I may say blind;

Once she was lovingly inclined;

Some circumstance has changed her mind."

There was a moment's silence; the pony stumbled over a stone in the path, and unseated his rider. A crash was heard among the dried leaves; the youth arose; a slight bruise on his left shoulder, and a disarrangement of his cravat, were the only traces that remained of this trifling accident."

This, we remarked, as we returned the papers, belongs apparently to the milk-and-water School of Novels.

You are quite right, our friend replied, and, in its present state, it is of course utterly unsaleable in the present day: we shall find, however, that the next stage of development will remove it into the strong-minded or Matter-of-Fact School. After dipping it into various acids, he again submitted it to us: it had now become the following:

"The evening was of the ordinary character, barometer at ‘change': a wind was getting up in the wood, and some rain was beginning to fall; a bad look-out for the farmers. A gentleman approached along the bridle-road, carrying a stout knobbed stick in his hand, and mounted on a serviceable nag, possibly worth some 40 pounds or so; there was a settled business-like expression on the rider's face, and he whistled as he rode; he seemed to be hunting for rhymes in his head, and at length repeated, in a satisfied tone, the following composition:

"Well! so my offer was no go!

She might do worse, I told her so;

She was a fool to answer ‘No.'

"However, things are as they stood;

Nor would I have her if I could.

For there are plenty more as good."

At this moment the horse set his foot in a hole, and rolled over; his rider rose with difficulty; he had sustained several severe bruises and fractured two ribs; it was some time before he forgot that unlucky day."

We returned this with the strongest expression of admiration, and requested that it might now be developed to the highest possible degree. Our friend readily consented, and shortly presented us with the result, which he informed us belonged to the Spasmodic or German School. We perused it with indescribable sensations of surprise and delight:

"The night was wildly tempestuous a hurricane raved through the murky forest furious torrents of rain lashed the groaning earth. With a headlong rush down a precipitous mountain gorge dashed a mounted horseman armed to the teeth his horse bounded beneath him at a mad gallop, snorting fire from its distended nostrils as it flew. The rider's knotted brows rolling eye-balls and clenched teeth expressed the intense agony of his mind weird visions loomed upon his burning brain while with a mad yell he poured forth the torrent of his boiling passion:

'Firebrands and daggers! hope hath fled!

To atoms dash the doubly dead!

My brain is fire my heart is lead!

'Her soul is flint, and what am I?

Scorch'd by her fierce, relentless eye,

Nothingness is my destiny!'

There was a moment's pause. Horror! his path ended in a fathomless abyss. ... A rush a flash a crash all was over. Three drops of blood, two teeth, and a stirrup were all that remained to tell where the wild horseman met his doom.

The young man was now recalled to consciousness, and shown the result of the workings of his mind; he instantly fainted away.

In the present infancy of the art we forbear from further comment on this wonderful discovery; but the mind reels as it contemplates the stupendous addition thus made to the powers of science.

Our friend concluded with various minor experiments, such as working up a passage of Wordsworth into strong, sterling poetry: the same experiment was tried on a passage of Byron, at our request, but the paper came out scorched and blistered all over by the fiery epithets thus produced.

As a concluding remark: could this art be applied (we put the question in the strictest confidence) could it, we ask, be applied to the speeches in Parliament? It may be but a delusion of our heated imagination, but we will still cling fondly to the idea, and hope against hope.

Pickman's Model by H P Lovecraft

You needn’t think I’m crazy, Eliot—plenty of others have queerer prejudices than this. Why don’t you laugh at Oliver’s grandfather, who won’t ride in a motor? If I don’t like that damned subway, it’s my own business; and we got here more quickly anyhow in the taxi. We’d have had to walk up the hill from Park Street if we’d taken the car.

I know I’m more nervous than I was when you saw me last year, but you don’t need to hold a clinic over it. There’s plenty of reason, God knows, and I fancy I’m lucky to be sane at all. Why the third degree? You didn’t use to be so inquisitive.

Well, if you must hear it, I don’t know why you shouldn’t. Maybe you ought to, anyhow, for you kept writing me like a grieved parent when you heard I’d begun to cut the Art Club and keep away from Pickman. Now that he’s disappeared I go around to the club once in a while, but my nerves aren’t what they were.

No, I don’t know what’s become of Pickman, and I don’t like to guess. You might have surmised I had some inside information when I dropped him—and that’s why I don’t want to think where he’s gone. Let the police find what they can—it won’t be much, judging from the fact that they don’t know yet of the old North End place he hired under the name of Peters. I’m not sure that I could find it again myself—not that I’d ever try, even in broad daylight! Yes, I do know, or am afraid I know, why he maintained it. I’m coming to that. And I think you’ll understand before I’m through why I don’t tell the police. They would ask me to guide them, but I couldn’t go back there even if I knew the way. There was something there—and now I can’t use the subway or (and you may as well have your laugh at this, too) go down into cellars any more.

I should think you’d have known I didn’t drop Pickman for the same silly reasons that fussy old women like Dr. Reid or Joe Minot or Bosworth did. Morbid art doesn’t shock me, and when a man has the genius Pickman had I feel it an honour to know him, no matter what direction his work takes. Boston never had a greater painter than Richard Upton Pickman. I said it at first and I say it still, and I never swerved an inch, either, when he shewed that Ghoul Feeding. That, you remember, was when Minot cut him.

You know, it takes profound art and profound insight into Nature to turn out stuff like Pickman’s. Any magazine-cover hack can splash paint around wildly and call it a nightmare or a Witches’ Sabbath or a portrait of the devil, but only a great painter can make such a thing really scare or ring true. That’s because only a real artist knows the actual anatomy of the terrible or the physiology of fear—the exact sort of lines and proportions that connect up with latent instincts or hereditary memories of fright, and the proper colour contrasts and lighting effects to stir the dormant sense of strangeness. I don’t have to tell you why a Fuseli really brings a shiver while a cheap ghost-story frontispiece merely makes us laugh. There’s something those fellows catch—beyond life—that they’re able to make us catch for a second. Doré had it. Sime has it. Angarola of Chicago has it. And Pickman had it as no man ever had it before or—I hope to heaven—ever will again.

Don’t ask me what it is they see. You know, in ordinary art, there’s all the difference in the world between the vital, breathing things drawn from Nature or models and the artificial truck that commercial small fry reel off in a bare studio by rule. Well, I should say that the really weird artist has a kind of vision which makes models, or summons up what amounts to actual scenes from the spectral world he lives in. Anyhow, he manages to turn out results that differ from the pretender’s mince-pie dreams in just about the same way that the life painter’s results differ from the concoctions of a correspondence-school cartoonist. If I had ever seen what Pickman saw—but no!

Here, let’s have a drink before we get any deeper. Gad, I wouldn’t be alive if I’d ever seen what that man—if he was a man—saw!

You recall that Pickman’s forte was faces. I don’t believe anybody since Goya could put so much of sheer hell into a set of features or a twist of expression. And before Goya you have to go back to the mediaeval chaps who did the gargoyles and chimaeras on Notre Dame and Mont Saint-Michel. They believed all sorts of things—and maybe they saw all sorts of things, too, for the Middle Ages had some curious phases. I remember your asking Pickman yourself once, the year before you went away, wherever in thunder he got such ideas and visions. Wasn’t that a nasty laugh he gave you? It was partly because of that laugh that Reid dropped him. Reid, you know, had just taken up comparative pathology, and was full of pompous inside stuff about the biological or evolutionary significance of this or that mental or physical symptom. He said Pickman repelled him more and more every day, and almost frightened him toward the last—that the fellow’s features and expression were slowly developing in a way he didn’t like; in a way that wasn’t human. He had a lot of talk about diet, and said Pickman must be abnormal and eccentric to the last degree. I suppose you told Reid, if you and he had any correspondence over it, that he’d let Pickman’s paintings get on his nerves or harrow up his imagination. I know I told him that myself—then.

But keep in mind that I didn’t drop Pickman for anything like this. On the contrary, my admiration for him kept growing; for that Ghoul Feeding was a tremendous achievement. As you know, the club wouldn’t exhibit it, and the Museum of Fine Arts wouldn’t accept it as a gift; and I can add that nobody would buy it, so Pickman had it right in his house till he went. Now his father has it in Salem—you know Pickman comes of old Salem stock, and had a witch ancestor hanged in 1692.

I got into the habit of calling on Pickman quite often, especially after I began making notes for a monograph on weird art. Probably it was his work which