Wandering and wondering

Sometimes I make a photo and wonder,
maybe no one has ever photographed this before.
This was such an occasion.

I’ve been very fortunate in my life to have had many opportunities to hike and trek in some beautiful and somewhat remote parts of the world; U.S. National Parks, Nepalese mountains, Guatemalan jungles, English moors, Canadian Rockies, Pacific islands. Whenever I ended up somewhere off-trail that seemed best described as “the middle of nowhere” I would invariably wonder if perhaps I was the first person to ever set foot on the very spot I was standing on at that very moment. I still remember the first time that thought came to me; it was in Yosemite National Park, I was lost and off-track and rather than worrying about my predicament I simply wondered about that very thought. Of course it is unlikely that this is indeed the case but for a few minutes I let myself wonder about what it would have been like to be Armstrong or Amundsen or Hillary (or should that be Norgay?). I don’t mean being the first to do something but rather seeing something that no one has seen before. For me it’s about the seeing not the doing. The other senses too to be sure, but mostly the seeing.

These days my wanderings tend to be confined to urban landscapes and suburban parks or at most to well beaten tracks but the thought still arises albeit with a twist. Now I am more likely to wonder: has what I am seeing ever been photographed by anyone before? This particular image above was one such moment. It is the side glass wall of a restaurant taken from within a car parking entrance. It looked beautiful to me and simply had to be photographed and then I wondered: has anyone ever photographed it before?

It’s a useless and meaningless pondering and I don’t have a need for an answer. The thought arises purely in a sense of wonderment.

An idea of beauty

This post is more useless than my usual fare. In this post I am exploring the idea of beauty. This exploration has happened over many years and what I present here is nothing more than a synopsis of the thought process that evolved over that period. It is useless in the sense that we all know innately what beauty is or at least what we might consider to be beautiful even if it is only on a personal level. For most people there is nothing about beauty that requires analysis. Philosophers of course would beg to differ but then again philosophers are never content with concepts that are not precisely defined. In my case, my exploration into beauty did not stem out of a desire to define it or even understand it for its own sake; I was interested in understanding the idea of beauty or more specifically, my idea of beauty so that I may have greater insight into my own nature. In any case there is probably no need to read all this but please know that whenever I visit your blog or photo stream and comment on the beauty of your work; it is not some haphazard remark. I promise you, much thought went into it.

~§~

Aesthetics is a branch of philosophy concerned with the study of the idea of beauty. The idea of beauty, not the study of beauty but the idea of it. That may be why it is said that beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Beauty is an idea, a concept, it could be said that beauty is in the mind but how does the thought of beauty arise? Is it an attribute of the object? Kant said that beauty is objective and universal effectively saying that some objects are beautiful to all. However contemporary thoughts on aesthetics tell us that beauty is not innate, rather, it is based on interpretation. As far as my limited study into this philosophy goes though, it seems to me that it falls short of asking the question; how it the interpretation formulated?

Over the years when talking to random friends about this topic I found that the word “aesthetics” is often thought to be about colour and tones, shapes and style, arrangement and coordination. When I asked about aesthetics in terms of photography then I got words like light and composition and depth of field and contrast. When I asked about beauty the responses were much more fuzzy, less technical. The words given for aesthetics were still there but intertwined with words like delicate, soft, sharp, colourful, positive, charming, intimate, simple and so on. Once again like all of these “surveys” I carry out, my sample is too small to derive any meaningful data or draw any specific conclusions and my line of questioning is hardly what one would call scientific. But over the years it has been these off-the-cuff conversations about this topic that got me thinking a little more deeply about what aesthetics means to me and what my idea of beauty might be.

I am happy to accept that aesthetics comprises all the things mentioned above. These could be considered the material qualities of aesthetics but I feel that there is much more to aesthetics than those essentially superficial aspects. I use the word superficial not in a derogatory manner but simply to say that those aspects are perhaps the obvious ones, on the surface as it were, and that beneath them lies another level of definition that may be useful in understanding this idea of beauty.

If I was asked whether I had a favourite theme to my photography I would have to say that it is largely urban grunge. I am attracted to dirty back alleys and industrial sites, abandoned buildings and rubbish bins. I have been given nice compliments on my images and for that I am grateful and appreciative and occasionally I am told that some image has managed to render something ugly into something of beauty. That kind of comment will immediately grab my attention and lead to a bunch of questions aimed at the poor hapless viewer who invariably wishes she had kept quiet.

Understanding how to coax beauty out of ugliness is an essential part of aesthetics. This understanding goes hand-in-hand with the concept that greatness exists in the small, inconspicuous details. Beauty and ugliness, greatness and smallness can co-exist in all things because they are nothing more than concepts of the mind. I consider this a truth of sorts, one that has become apparent to me because of photography which is, if nothing else, an art of observation and it is in observing the nature of things that truths are revealed. So just as material qualities are a part of aesthetics, these ideas of truths I consider to be the spiritual qualities of aesthetics.

But there is still more to this philosophy known as aesthetics. Like all philosophies there is a need for moral precepts though this idea seems at first to be incongruous with the idea of beauty. After all, what does morality have to do with beauty? When I create a photograph many decisions are made, consciously or not. Compositional choice is one important decision that must be made. What is included, what is left out. What is necessary and what is irrelevant. I focus on the intrinsic, the inner nature of the object of my attention and I ignore its conceptual value. These decisions made before pressing the shutter button and many other decisions made in post-processing conspire to put forward my impression onto my potential audience. At some level some moral precepts are at play. The decisions I make can sway the audience to see something that contradicts the reality of what I photographed simply by selectively removing the context of the whole. And this brings me to yet another aspect of philosophy, that which is concerned with understanding reality, namely the metaphysical, yet one more aspect of aesthetics.

Beauty is conceptual. It is in the eye of the beholder. It is a thought that arises in the mind built upon memories and biases. Like all thoughts, beauty evolves out of nothingness and devolves back into nothingness. Beauty, like everything else, is transient in nature and changes continuously. If I am to take a flower for an example I may deem the tightly closed bud as beautiful and as the flower blooms I will continue to see it as beautiful but for different reasons. Then as the flower wilts and dies, again I see beauty that had not existed before. Eventually all traces of the flower disappear and the beauty it once had has long since been relegated to memories. Ironically, my ability to see or recognise beauty in the first place was borne out of memories and knowledge that I have accumulated over the duration of what I call my life. Prior to memories and knowledge, back when I was a child, I would have been equally enchanted by a flower as by a piece of dung. And this brings me to the last aspect of aesthetics that I need to include if I am to understand my relationship to beauty. The state of mind.

In prior posts I have written about art appreciation. When it comes to beauty there is also a need for an appreciation of sorts but in much broader terms. In the apparent chaos of life there is an underflow of cosmic order. It is an appreciation for this cosmic order that allows beauty to be seen, sometimes in the most unlikely places. Focusing on chaos makes it difficult to see beauty and for me, looking beyond chaos requires a special state of mind. I need to accept the inevitable. I am not talking about acquiring a fatalistic outlook but simply accepting that much if not all of life’s twists and turns are not only beyond my control but are also part of a bigger picture, all of it synchronised to perfection like a divinely choreographed, celestial dance. Seeing and responding to life in much the same way as I imagine, a child does. Accepting the inevitable helps me appreciate the cosmic order which in turn reveals beauty that was always there for the seeing in such quantities that it no longer needs to be labelled or, for that matter, relegated to memory. Just as for the child, beauty’s enchantment lies at every twist and turn of life.

Perfection rules, Okay

Some time ago a friend was working on a photograph in Photoshop. He had been working on it for a few days on and off. There were many layers that I could see and many more that I couldn’t judging by the size of the scroll bar on the side of the panel. I asked him what it was he was trying to achieve and he simply said “it’s not quite right”. I looked at the image and after a minute quietly said, “it’s perfect as it is”. My friend laughed and mumbled something about nothing being perfect. “You’re lying or you’ve no idea what perfection is” he said. And as if to spare my ego he added, “I’ll go with the latter”.

That seems to be a common belief amongst most people and seemingly all the more so amongst artists. Nothing’s perfect. It’s almost as if perfection is a pie-in-the-sky goal that serves no purpose other than to drive us to be more creative. We seek it the way a pilgrim seeks salvation, following any means, any methods, any rules that show promise but all the while with a sneaking suspicion that the goal is unreachable.

In conversations I find that if perfection is defined as “being without flaw or defect” than it is generally agreed that nothing can be perfect and apparently, all the more so when it is man-made. To be fair however I do hear people attribute the term of perfection to certain things at certain times. Mostly it is attributed to something in nature, a perfect sunset, a perfectly beautiful flower, a perfect view. Recently a friend told me that he’d just had a perfect day which consisted of spending the day in pajamas and watching movies while eating junk food. However, while he may have described it as a perfect day I am sure that if he was to spend the rest of his days doing exactly the same thing the days would quickly become less than perfect. In any case I have never heard it uttered by an artist about his or her own work. Almost as if the artist sees herself and her art as one and knowing deep down that she herself is flawed finds it impossible to witness the perfection in her own work. I should perhaps state at this point that I am making somewhat sweeping statements from my observations of only a handful of artists whom I have the pleasure to know. And as a further disclaimer I will add that none make a living from their art. But if I may, I will continue.

Someone once told me, you won’t know if it’s what you want until you’ve defined it. The trouble with defining perfection is that it seems to be subjective. I have talked to artists who have no problems seeing perfection in the work of their idols but find it impossible to see it in their own art. They may like what they’ve created but they invariably stop short of calling it perfect. The ancient Greeks, interestingly enough, had no problems seeing perfection in their own work and I see that as being due to the fact that they had a workable definition for perfection. The term perfection was attributed to anything that fulfilled its purpose. So a spatula for example, which can flip a pancake as it was intended to do (can you guess I had pancakes for breakfast this morning?), would be considered perfect, though I am not sure if the Greeks had spatulas, much less pancakes. In any case, the ancient Greeks also believed that humans had a purpose, namely to be happy, and since happiness is achievable than it was deemed that humans could attain perfection.

As my friend struggles with his image, trying so diligently to bring out the beauty he can envisage in his mind’s eye, he finds himself (though perhaps not consciously) bound by rules and theories about making the perfect photograph. There is no doubt that rules on composition, depth of field and lighting can all contribute to the aesthetics of an image. Even the breaking of these rules can at times work wonders. But the entire time there are rules, either to be followed or to be broken. And all the while he may be asking himself: “where is the beauty?”

When I make an image I too inadvertently follow rules. Not consciously the way a beginner might do but at some level some rules are remembered and interpreted perhaps even broken for the sake of achieving this… well, this ideal of perfection. And this perfection, it seems to me, is often tied in with beauty where art is concerned. Lately however, I have been wondering if beauty is indeed what I am trying to achieve with my photographs. Anyone who knows me well will know that I tend to use photography as a catalyst to understanding the meaning of life, the universe and everything. But within that context I create individual images and for each image there is a desire, subtle as it may be, to make it just right, to make it perfect. The thought that this may be unachievable is gently pushed aside by another desire, namely a desire to create beauty. Or at least that is how I have interpreted it until recently.

Art can evoke any number of a vast array of emotions and feelings. I find that the making of art, in my case, photographs, is equally charged with all sorts of mental turbulence (as per my previous post). From negatives to positives, from peaks to troughs, from anger to jubilance. And throughout all of that an image forms itself and while there might be beauty that emerges in the process there is sometimes something else there as well, something that for some reason seems to require some sort of permission to… to be. That something, when I allow it to emerge is a feeling of joy or contentment, a kind of bliss. The image may not be perfect, the rules may not have been applied, or broken, as well as they should have been, the photoshopping skills may have been lacking and yet despite all of this there is a sense of happiness. Not the happiness I feel when I buy a new laptop or if I was to win a trip overseas but rather a happiness born out of a simple act of creating something that deep down was created so that it could be shared. This feeling is pure and it’s simple. It doesn’t come with an adrenalin rush or so much as a “woo hoo!”. But it’s there, blissful contentment, more satisfying than your regular marketable joy and longer lasting too.

And so I have come to the conclusion that for me the creation of art is not about creating beauty or interpreting reality or expressing myself or passing the time, it’s about being happy, the simple kind of happy that is always there for the taking but that I fail to recognize all too often because I’m so used to the kind of happiness that comes with the fanfare and  the wrappings, the kind that is short-lived leaving me just wanting more and more in an unsustainable cycle.

As my friend steps out of the room to get himself a coffee I look again at his image and think to myself, “but it is perfect because it makes me happy just to see it” and in so doing it has fulfilled its purpose because that’s what art seeks to give, happiness, pure and simple. And if the ancient Greeks are to be believed then art, in making us happy, also makes us perfect.