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The annual exhibition of the Photographic Society is now open. Year by year the photographers are growing, as a race, sadder and wiser men; year by year the Photographic Exhibition is improving and deteriorating—it is improving in all points of mechanical perfection, sensitiveness of chemicals, sharpness of focus, and delicacy of tone; it is deteriorating in the equally-important qualities of invention, suggestiveness, and variety. Some brilliant exceptions there are to the race—rash neophytes, who will attempt new combinations of lights, or grouping, or accessories, the inevitable result of which is that half the picture is out of focus, and no one will look at it but some pitying friend, who shakes his head over it, and says, “Ah! I told you it would fail; this will teach you not to try what has been proved to lie beyond the limits of the art;” as if any art were limited, least of all one yet in its infancy, as photography undoubtedly is.

But the chief cause of deterioration lies in the rapid diminution of the class of things which are pronounced to be “suitable to photography.” At present this class may be said to consist of still-life (which, being photographically interpreted, means dead game and ornamental vases), single portraits, groups of three, sculpture, exteriors of buildings, hill country, and microscopic objects. All other created things belong to the “unsuitable” class, though the following are occasionally attempted by some aspirants, who are regarded by the more experienced with a mixed feeling of pity and contempt:—Live animals, groups, interiors, combinations of background with foreground figures, flat country, and waterfalls.

There is so much sameness, both of merit and demerit, in the exhibition that it would be invidious to select examples of either. The portraits by Mr. Macandrew, Mr. C. Wright, Messrs. Maull and Polyblank, Mr. H. Watkins, and the London Stereoscopic Company (especially the cartes de visite frame of the latter) are exceedingly good; and the miniatures of Messrs. Lock and Whitfield are exquisite. So are the figure groups of Mr. H. Hering, who seems to excel in his delineation of child-life. In Mr. R. Fenton's “Furness Abbey” a very happy effect has been obtained by the lights on the ground in the interior, making the building stand out in much bolder relief than shadow would have given.

Messrs. Dunn, Mudd, B. Jones, Gordon, Bedford, and Fry have been most successful in their landscapes and architectural bits. “A Holiday in the Wood,” by Mr. H. P. Robinson, deserves notice as one of those patchwork pictures which are strongly censured by some as the ruin of all real art. It is, indeed, painfully artificial; the great difficulty being to fill in the gaps where the various fragments join so as to avoid the effect of one photograph having been cut out and pasted on to another. I prefer, however, to notice only the artistic power shown in the grouping: this no picture can dispense with, while the imperfections here are merely such as require improvements in materials and mechanism to overcome.

Messrs. Cundall and Downes' rendering of Mr. Hicks' picture, “The Post Office,” exhibited last year at the Academy, is an excellent reproduction of oil-painting, showing at the same time the “unsuitability” of several of the colours employed. If any painter would condescend to use only such colours as photograph well, finishing as carefully and well as if it were in proper colours, he would produce an extraordinary picture, no doabt, but one which could be multiplied for the benefit of the million with a beauty and likeliness which no engraving could pretend to.

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In “Studies,” by W. Peters, No. 1 should, of course, have been labelled “Poisoned!” and No. 2 “Tired of Life” In No. 1 the lady on the right is saying with a melancholy satisfaction, “Yes! there is a white precipitate (she has been trying some chemical test on the tea); we are poisoned beyond a doubt.” The lady on the left, though pointedly appealed to, can make no reply; she is fast subsiding into stupor; whilst the gentleman behind, with an indignation excusable under the circumstances, strikes the table as he adds, “But we will not die unavenged; I have yet an hour or two to live, and I'll write to the Times!” The conversation passing in No 2 is not perhaps quite so obvious: the youth in the window is remarking, “To return to what I said at first, Have we, or have we not, anything worth living for? I say No.” And his elder brother replies, “As I haven't understood a word you have said, you'll excuse my committing myself.” It may not be amiss to conclude with a few remarks on the faults most commonly committed in photography, and the probable means of avoiding them. The point of view is almost the only thing now left to the artist, and in landscapes it is almost as difficult to find a bad one as in portraits and groups to find a good one. All, then, that the artist can do to improve the landscape is to put in a foreground figure, and this is generally a man sitting on a stile; this is not only objectionable on the ground of sameness, but also because experience convinces us that a stile is the least convenient seat usually to be found in a country scene. In portraits there seems to be only one attitude admissible for a gentleman: you must dangle your right hand over one knee, and have your left elbow on a small round table—so small that one can imagine no other purpose which such a table could serve. If not seated, you must rest your right hand on the chair-back, while the left arm, weakened by a long course of rest on small tables, is supported by putting the thumb into the pocket. One haunting feature in pictures has hitherto been spared to photographs—I mean the eternal scroll which the M. P. is condemned to hold. However, in No. 275 we see fatal proof that the golden age of the art is over—the scroll is henceforth inevitable. If I may venture on giving a few hints on this point I would say, leave the grouping As much as possible to nature; repeat the same picture again and again, if necessary, till a happy expression has been caught, and watch the sitters at times when they are not being photographed, and are thinking of other things; thus you will see what attitude suits each best. And, above all, try new and original effects; even if they fail, failures always teach something; and, in any case, the art will be better advanced thus than by endless repetitions of cathedral fronts, dead birds, and woody nooks.