[Children Fishing]

William Mullins, of Franklin, Pennsylvania, was a minor member of the Photo-Secession. He was included in the Philadelphia Photographic Salon at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in 1898, the first exhibition of photography in America held at a recognized fine arts institution. Juried by two painters and three photographers, including Alfred Stieglitz, the show was the first to exhibit photographs solely for their artistic merit, completely abandoning specific categories such as genre, landscape, or portraiture. Mullins's work appeared in the October 1901 issue of "Camera Notes," but his greatest public achievement was the display of twelve of his photographs in the International Exhibition of Pictorial Photography, at the Albright Art Gallery in Buffalo, New York, in 1910.
Water was nature's living mirror to members of the Photo-Secession, a reflective, ever-changing surface that served as a perfect test of an artist's pictorial skills. Elegant distortions caused by surface ripples appear in picture after picture from the period, but few photographs are as well constructed as this one of children fishing. By cropping his print to a narrow rectangular strip, Mullins emphasized the uninflected expanse of placid water. The low camera position relates the anglers to the distant shore--a line of trees as irregular as their bamboo poles--while their heads float above the horizon like bobbers on the lake's surface.