Among the first Sargents that Henry James ever saw was Lady With A Rose. Of it and the artist he said, "it offers the slightly 'uncanny' spectacle of a talent which on the threshold of its career has nothing more to learn. It is not simply precisely in the guise of maturity--a phenomenon we very often meet, which deceives us only for an hour; it is the freshness of youth combined with the artistic experience, really felt and assimilated, of generations. .." (The Painter's Eye). Reading this in Ratcliff's book on Sargent it made me wonder what photographers something like this has ever been said of.
The notion of a photographer maturing, of a critic of James's stature even noticing a young photographer's work struck me as rare.
What is it that non-photographers look at when they look at a photograph?
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