"TOO MUCH ALIKE"

Rotorua Morning Post, Volume 2, Issue 401, 9 December 1932, Page 3

"TOO MUCH ALIKE"

MODERN WOMEN PHOTOGRAPHIC RECORDS OF WORLD'S JFAMOUS BEATUIES. MEN EASIER SUBJECTS. Tennyson's "Dream of Fair Women" could not have sugg*ested anything more lovely than some of the photographs of the beauties -of the Victorian days and their modern sisters which are to be seen at the studios of Elliott and Fry, where the work of two of London's best-known firms of photographers, Elliott and Fry, and J. Russell and Sons, is now being carried on in co-operation. Photographic records of many of the most famous men and women of the last 50 years are among the 600,000 negatives which will be merged in one great collection as a result of the combining of the firms. Here are lovely women of every type — stately Yictorians with masses of elaborately dressed hair, wearing high-necked gowns with sweeping skirts, in sharp contrast with the sleek-headed, shingled women of the ja*esent generation. As we looked at these portraits I talked with Mr. W. Stoneman abont the difference between the beauty of the modern woman and the woman of 35 and 40 years ago, writes a Daily Mail reporter. Mr. Stoneman estimates that he has photographed about 20,000 men, in addition to thousands of women. A Strain. "After 40 years," he said, "I am now going to photograph men exclusively. T think I am entitled to give my nerves a rest, for photographing some modern women is really a dreadful strain. "My trouble with the women of today is that they iare so mucli alike. They dress alike, and they make up their faces alike. Some of them make up so much that they hide their real beauty. Women nearly always have charm, and this in a great many cases is apt to evade the camera, but is obtainable by sljfllful work in the studio. * "Clothes, of course, make a tremendous difference when you start comparing the women of to-day and yesterday. We may laugh at the flowing robes of the Victorian dresses, but they were more effqptive from the photographer's point of view. The short skirts worn by fashionable women four years or so ago made an artistic picture practically impossible. "Women's faces are, perhaps, stronger now tban they were, but they have lost a little of the poet's fancy. Mr. Stoneman considered Lady Beatrice Pole-Carew, widow of the late Lieut-General Sir Reginald Pole-Ca-rew, to be the most beautiful woman he ever photographed. "Thirty years ago," he said, "she was one of.the most beautiful women of her day. Her beauty had an exquisite quality. "Another very beautiful woman of a different type was Mme. Antoinette Sterling, the singer. She had a strong face marked with power and character. Queen Alexandra, too, was a woman of outstanding beauty. I photographed her three years before she died, and she then retained to an amazing degree the beauty of her face and figure."