Professor Santayana gave the first of the series of Camera Club lectures last night in the Lecture Room of the Fogg Museum on "The Photograph and the Mental Image." He said in part:

Photography is a means of preserving and renewing visual images, just as writing is a means of preserving and renewing thoughts. Photography is an artificial extension of memory, and what memory does for experience--enabling us to retain it--photography may do for memory itself, by helping us to refresh the mental images we have there, which naturally are always fading away. Photography also enables us to get visual ideas of many things we have never seen because they are at a distance; and it will probably enable men in future to have correct visual images of things that will have disappeared from the world.

Photographs may be very beautiful, if the objects they represent are beautiful or are beautifully lighted and posed; but photography has none of the functions of creative art. Creative art consists in an interpretation of things in relation to some moral interest; it ought to transform or idealize its subject in many ways, so as to bring out its tendency or meaning. But photography, like memory, only transforms things unintentionally and because it can not help itself. The cause of any change here is a weakness in the machinery of reproduction; it cannot be an imaginative bias, since the reproduction is by a machine, not by a mind subject to instincts and having natural ideas. It is accordingly a mistake to associate photography with creative art or try to make it imitate the processes of creative art. Vague, deceptive or idealized memory or history is bad. These pleasing changes, being mechanically caused, are mere illusions, and the pleasure we can take in them is shallow. Photographs should aim at being true, but there is no limit to the beauty and interest which photographs may have, in the same way in which real people and things may have beauty.