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FAR LEFT - BELOW: PILLAR OF LIGHT, THE IDOL SORSHIPPER5, GREAT ASKEW, FRANCES WILSON America, Clarence White wrote: " To many people photography is servant. Cox, like his contemporaries Franz Kafka and T.S. Eliot, had a 'day' job. Cox was not unusual in this among Pictorialists; Max Thorek in Chicago, for example, was a doctor who founded a hospital bearing his name. This selection of 75 Cox photographs is the first showing of his work in over fifty years. merely a mechanical process. To an increasing number, however, photography is being seen as an art, by which personal impressions of nature and human life may be expressed as truly as by the brush." Pictorialists, including Cox, intervened in the making of their pictures so as to push them beyond the results obtained if cameras, photo-paper and film were simply left to their basic mechanical procedures. Athens of the Eraser: The Photographs of H.6. Cox is at Presentation Are there specific Pictorialist subjects? Pictorial Photography Writing in his Principles of House Gallery from June 7 to August 3. (1923) John Wallace Gillies says not: "The pictorial worker is without restriction as to subject matter as long as he does something practical with it. He can very well make a picture of an old shoe if he creates a picture with the material he selects, seeing to matters of arrangement and control of values in such a manner that the average man will be impressed, not so much with the pictures and subject matter itself, but by the way the subject is handled." An 'invisible', but very interesting aspect of Cox's photographs is that their composition was guided by, and to some extent derived from his application of the principles of 'dynamic symmetry' developed by Jay Hambidge. Cox wrote a book on 'dynamic symmetry' himself, following Hambidge's lead, the manuscript of which will be in the show. Dynamic Symmetry posits, amongst other things, that the Golden Ratio will aid artists in making good pictures as well as telling viewers after the fact why certain pictures seem to 'work' and others not. Many Pictorialists, including Cox, used these principles as a means to an end and as a means to analyze ends - in both cases the 'end' could be said to be the idea of 'traditional beauty'. This pursuit of beauty may in retrospect be seen to be overshadowed by Modernist photography in the 1920s and 30s, but it can also be seen as an extension of ideas the Alfred Stieglitz promoted in Camera Steichen from the period around 1910. Cox worked within the photographic guidelines set by previous generations, but within those parameters he is probably the best practitioner that Vancouver has ever known. Was he an 'amateur'? His 'amateur' status seemingly relates only to his full-time job as a civil Work. Cox's graduated tonality and misty-eyed world view is exactly that of Steiglitz and Edward July | August