Eyes of the Beholders: Beauty or "beauty"?
By James Disley
13 April 2007
JPG asks: What does "beauty" mean to you? It's a good question, and one we photographers should spend some time on. After all, these days we live in a relativist world. We have to think about what things mean to us, rather than accept someone else's big idea as our own. Objectivity is dead, and along with it went a lot of those other things with capital letters: God, Morality and, yes, Beauty. So, in keeping with that, I will follow JPG's lead, drop the big old B and talk about "beauty" too. After all, to me, JPG captures something of the Spirit of the Age, and you just cannot argue with the Spirit of the Age can you? The Spirit of the Age has capitals.
So, to put that Spirit in (over) familiar words, beauty is in the eye of the beholder - we have heard it a million times. It's not really a new idea, but, in these self-affirming times, it is more powerful now than it's ever been. It was two hundred years ago, during the Romantic age, that our cult of the all-powerful self really started in earnest. Romanticism got us where we are today, with its new ideas about the individualised response to sublime scenery, its disdain for organized religion and traditional European political models, and the encouragement it gave to solitary individuals, communing with Nature on the mountainside in a way only they truly understood. But therein lay a big difference, one that has grown greater as the years passed - the Romantics had an idea about Genius that we lost with our recognition of Ego; individual perception was, for them, legitimised by individual power, Beauty was created by the Self but only a certain kind of Self had the power to pull it off. It was simply not possible on a mass scale.
However, time passed, Romantic ideas became more and more widespread, and we entered a technological age. It wasn't so many years until those wanderers on the mountainside had, not a paintbrush or notebook clutched in their hands, but a camera, a tool with which they too could create a beautiful artwork, with a lot less effort than in ages past. The results are there in every sublime sunset photo, sweeping landscape and perfect portrait. Beauty became accessible, easy, maybe even a little boring. And so, powered by the relentless human urge to do something different to how it had been done before, a new grammar of beauty had to be invented. And we did it! We can now see it in the works on JPG and the best of flickr - millions of people now appear equipped to see the beauty in a crack in the pavement, a blurry figure in a dirty hotel room, a rusted and unreadable sign. This is pretty new, and undoubtedly a Very Good Thing. However, I cannot help but feel this leads us to believe in ourselves a little too much; perhaps, after all, the old rules still apply and we find "beauty" exactly where we expect to find it.
When I look around the JPG site, I see many things I think are beautiful and which invoke an emotional response in me. It's why I'm here. But I also see a lot lot more that don't touch me at all. Is this a failure in me or in the photograph I'm looking at? That's pretty hard to answer definitively, but I'll stick my neck out and blame the photo! After all, I've looked hard at and been taken aback by enough great photography to think I actually have an idea about what makes a quality work. Most art, like most things, has no beauty, all the more so in an age in which we are all photographers. Surely the idea that something can be beautiful simply by virtue of someone saying it is so is a falsehood, perhaps a failure or misuse of language, perhaps at worst an excuse for inferior artwork. It seems to me that beauty is an ideal rather than an imposition, exceedingly difficult to pin down of course, but one that definitely transcends the individual's subjective response. Compare the submitted photos to the published photos for a good illustration of this. The stuff that gets through is of a higher quality, I'm sure we can all see it, even whilst making our own choices within the published pool. Something lifts the vast majority of those works above the mass; they are better conceived, better executed. Hell, they're more beautiful. As such, surely we are forced to recognise the existence of standards, aesthetic rules that lay too deep for words, a beauty beyond the commonplace. It is for this reason that paintings thought beautiful in the Renaissance, remain so today, despite the intervening shifts in aesthetic consciousness - likewise, the beautiful blurry darkness of a great Holga shot, unimaginably different and modern as it appears now, will hold its power in two, three hundred years. This is because the real beauty of a great work of art is in its power to tug at our soul, a strength that will not be lost on people, whatever age they live in.
So, having said all that, I want to take another look at that capital B and what it means to me. I think it belongs there after all, relic though it may be. Without it, we are missing something, failing to acknowledge something intangible about the power of great art. I hope to capture Beauty one day, along with all those other, smaller beauties that will come my way. Do you know what I mean?
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