Beauty in Photography (1)

Beauty. In every human sphere it's an elusive term.

I sent away to a second-hand bookseller for a slim volume on the subject in relation to photography. It was a search for companionship, hopefully not runway lights for takeoffs or landings with the camera. The little book arrived. A clean bold tool of thought stood out right at the beginning. 

"Landscape pictures can offer us, I think, three verities‒geography, autobiography, and metaphor."

Robert Adams, Beauty in Photography, 1996

 

I looked to see how 'geography, autobiography, and metaphor' might have influenced landscape pictures I had taken this year at Halibut Point.

I was also curious how those criteria might apply to other types of photographs. For instance, could you substitute 'nature' for 'geography'? 

Adams went on to say, "the three kinds of information strengthen each other and reinforce what we all work to keep intact‒an affection for life."

"There is a certainty in geography that is a relief from the shadow world of romantic egoism. 

If landscape art were only reportage, however, it would amount to an ingredient for science, which it is not. There is always a subjective aspect in landscape art, something in the picture that tells us as much about who is behind the camera as about what is in front of it. 

Making photographs has to be, then, a personal matter; when it is not, the results are not persuasive. Only the artist's presence in the work can convince us."

"If a view of geography does not imply something more enduring than a specific piece of terrain then the picture will hold us only briefly.... 

The job of the photographer...is not to catalogue indisputable fact but to try to be coherent about intuition and hope."

"The Beauty that concerns me is that of Form. Beauty is, in my view, a synonym for the coherence and structure underlying life.... 

The form to which art points is of an incontrovertible brilliance, but it is also far too intense to examine directly. We are compelled to understand Form by its fragmentary reflection in the daily objects around us; art will never fully define light."

"How do we judge art? Basically, I think, by whether it reveals to us important Form that we ourselves have experienced but to which we have not paid adequate attention. Successful art rediscovers Beauty for us."

"Though I have just stressed the formal qualities of these pictures, their beauty is not, to repeat, solely a matter of related shapes. Beauty is, at least in part, always tied to subject matter."

"The only thing that is new in art is the example; the message is, broadly speaking, the same‒coherence, form, meaning.... 

What is new in art? Man Ray, who liked to make puzzles out of solutions, once observed that 'there is not progress in art, any more than there is in making love.' 

Minor White's understanding [is] of art as metaphor, as a suggestion of similarities between the known and the barely known."

Grape Plume Moth