What is beauty?

Bobby Ironsights said:

Funny thing comes to mind, now that you mention famous artists, there was a study done, can't remember the name of it, looking at the correlation between profession and mental illness. Artists rated most highly and amoung artists, visual artists rated lowest on the scale, but still higher than the general populace. sculptors had the highest rate of all. I think it was like 60% among sculptors. I've never looked at a sculpture since without being reminded of that.

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most every person on the planet has a mental illness of form or another. no one is perfect, without sin, or without baggage.
if the creative folks didn't make things we would live in a very drab place.

My current art project is called 'The Other Landscape'. I think that art is a very powerful medium to communicate. Some of the images in that series of photographs will be ugly, on purpose, and some will be beautiful (in my opinion anyway), on purpose.
It's a series of fifteen images that go together. The project will be incomplete without the ugly ones. Does that mean that only the beautiful images will be considered art and the ugly ones fillers? Not in my opinion. If I'm trying to describe something ugly and I make it beautiful, people are likely to miss the point.

jpeets said:

It is probably one of the more powerful and masterful images I know, and tears at the heart, but beautiful - no. To me, beauty cannot coexist with such pain.

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Interesting. I remember having this same disagreement with my best friend in our senior year in high school. As with him, you & I must now disagree while respecting each others' opinions. In this case, I feel that it is not the pain that is beautiful, but rather the love and compassion that this photo captures.

My main subject matter, nature scenes on BC's north coast, combined with the way I photograph it means that most of my successful photographs are probably seen as beautiful. I'm not a 'maker' of images, a person who uses what's at hand to illustrate their way of seeing (billschwab being a fantastic example), but rather a 'grazer' of the landscape, a person who can wander for hours before exposing any film looking for distinctly unique combinations and interrelationships between elements in a scene, or distinctive reactions to natural processes. While people may say my photographs aren't beautiful, most would agree the subject matter is.

Edit: here's my APUG gallery;

(there was a url link here which no longer exists)

Murray

cowanw said:

I blurted out loud what a beautiful photo this was. Terrible but beautiful.

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I find that some things can be beautiful and harrowing at the same time. One of Chopin's Nocturnes, which are some of the most beautiful pieces of piano music I know, is also distressing to me because the first time I heard it I happened to be reading Memoirs of an Infantry Officer. Looking at W. Eugene Smith's photograph is, for me, similar. In many ways the beauty of the picture amplifies the horror I feel about the story behind it.

tinyfailures said:

More broadly, I think we perceive beauty in a context of both classicism and modernism. (I mean the Western ideals.) Forms that are simplified to the level of Bauhaus necessity that still display classical proportions are often commonly accepted as beautiful.

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Proportion was key to the Greeks sense of beauty; later on in the middle ages 'completeness' was added to the Western aesthetic, so the disfigured could not be beautiful by definition. These two principles (proportion and completeness) seem to have been the standard required for beauty since then. After all, we almost never see the disabled portrayed as beautiful; and nature has needed to be 'untouched' to be deemed beautiful.

I wonder whether in modern times our sense of beauty has moved beyond these two principles or not. Perhaps it's just our sense of what 'proportion' and 'completeness' mean that's changed.

Albreht Durer made a drawing of his very old mother, as she was at that moment. So in appearance she was not very pritty girl. But find that drawing and look. It is heavenly beauty.
Rembrandt made a painting of his selfpertrature, with all his "uglines". Who ever see it say "beatiful".
Early Renaisance paintings idealized all. No ugly face can be found. Just a little after, artists starts to paint things as they are, includinf "ugly" faces. That paintings are no less beautiful, but I would say even opposite.
Beauty radiate out of the photograph, painting,... It warms up your heart. If you do not feel it... Beauty has just nothing in common with three, face, pot,... actual appearance. You can shoot very ugly person yet people can like it very much (because it is all beatuful). Beauty comes from the brush stroke, line shape and position, light and shade blending, ... That beauty is much much higher than any uglines under the sun. GOT?

And for your vote: there is no measure stick for beauty, nor one or even hundred people can qualify it. To see the beauty you have to have "the heart" and be in the mud.

www.Leica-R.com

Daniel I couldn't agree with you more, but when I talk to my students I urge them that in order to see they have to throw out of the window any preconceived notion that something is ugly or pretty.
I tell them to look at things with no critique, either it be positive or negative.
If you allow yourself to do that for long enough true Beauty will come through.
The artist gift is the one of being able to pierce through convention and have the courage to celebrate what resonate in his/her own heart.

Like porn, I know it when I see it.

DanielOB said:

Albreht Durer made a drawing of his very old mother, as she was at that moment. So in appearance she was not very pritty girl. But find that drawing and look. It is heavenly beauty.
Rembrandt made a painting of his selfpertrature, with all his "uglines". Who ever see it say "beatiful".
Early Renaisance paintings idealized all. No ugly face can be found. Just a little after, artists starts to paint things as they are, includinf "ugly" faces. That paintings are no less beautiful, but I would say even opposite.
Beauty radiate out of the photograph, painting,... It warms up your heart. If you do not feel it... Beauty has just nothing in common with three, face, pot,... actual appearance. You can shoot very ugly person yet people can like it very much (because it is all beatuful). Beauty comes from the brush stroke, line shape and position, light and shade blending, ... That beauty is much much higher than any uglines under the sun. GOT?

And for your vote: there is no measure stick for beauty, nor one or even hundred people can qualify it. To see the beauty you have to have "the heart" and be in the mud.

www.Leica-R.com

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IMHO, beauty is truth. Durer's drawing of his mother illustrates this idea perfectly!

I think there is a danger of confusing prettiness with beauty; they are by no means the same thing. Beautiful can be very ugly indeed, and pretty can be far from beautiful.

There was much debate about Salgado's Migrations work, for example here in the NYT, as many people seemed to feel he shouldn't take such beautiful pictures of such horrific things. They were right in only one way - the pictures were beautiful - but they were certainly not pretty.

Cheers, P.

After two month on a waiting list, I finally received my copy of the Darkroom cookbook today. On my way home, I could not wait to start reading it, opened it, and the first lines were a quote of Ansel Adams on the inextricability of Art and beauty.

I find his lines wonderful, here it goes:

"I believe the function of the artist in all media is a creation of affirmations; the search for and the realization of beauty.
The function of art includes an establishment of communication, at the imaginative and constructive level, and placing the emphasis of thought and emotion in relationship to an ideal world.
The glorification of decay, filth, disease, despair, and evil succeeds only in blunting our necessary awareness of these negative qualities...
I believe the artist can accomplish most on the agenda for survival by creating beauty, by setting examples of beauty in order; by embracing the concept of the essential dignity of the human mind and spirit. " Ansel Adams.

It feels awkward to write after such words, because I feel they should be left alone, but I cannot help wondering if Ansel would have found the Capa photograph beautiful.
Reading his words, I think that the answer would be "no" because his vision of beauty was an elitist one which was the result of a constructed approach in both the photograph's intellectual approach and exploration, and its execution.

And may be this is what beauty is, to see what others have not seen, have not felt and show how beautiful it is.

One of the very recent photographs which I found beautiful was this one:
http://www.londonphotography.org.uk/members/slides/OdetteEngland.html

Ian Leake said:

I believe that all of my successful photos are beautiful, because if I don't find them beautiful then I don't consider them to be successful.

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It's a matter of taste, my taste in beauty and my favorite subjects are images of people "that are not looking at the camera", or I wont shoot. I personally find candid shots as priceless.

Erratum:

delphine said:

...a constructed approach in both the photographER's intellectual approach and exploration, and its execution.

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phc
There was much debate about Salgado's Migrations work, for example here in the NYT, as many people seemed to feel he shouldn't take such beautiful pictures of such horrific things. They were right in only one way - the pictures were beautiful - but they were certainly not pretty.

That is so funny. Are any crucifixion, including one by Rubens, not the same think. So how that stupid guys could clasify Rubens? Among countless other, google for Caravaggio, Judith Beheading Holofernes. If you want to learn what beauty is ask artists that makes it, not the one that just bla, bla, bla... (that NYCTimes comment remains me of asking the poor how to become reach).

Daniel OB
www.Leica-R.com