Beauty in Photography (3) - Abstractions

Traversing the landscape of Halibut Point I return to the questions and insights of Robert Adams' Beauty in Photography. 

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

Sometimes this leads to abstractions pulled like taffy from the facts of the environment. Twisting, swirling strands appear as little enhancements and contradictions. Their shapes and colors tell stories of their own interwoven with the accustomed narratives.

On, on, on goes the pulse of life. Its familiar details reconfigure enchantingly. The new and the worn make portraits of vitality. Robert Adams offers these further thoughts.

"Art simplifies. It is never exactly equal to life. In the visual arts, this careful sorting out in favor of order is called composition."

"Art's beauty does not lead, of course, to narrow doctrine. The Form it affirms is not neatly finished, at least to our eyes. It does not lead directly to a theology or a system of ethics."

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

"...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."

"Photography is by nature on intimate terms with old familiar subject matter; all that remains now is for us to create new illusions in the service of truth."

"One standard, then, for the evaluation of art is the degree to which it gives us a fresh intimation of Form."

"Geography by itself is difficult to value accurately‒what we hope for from the artist is help in discovering the significance of a place."

"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."

"The beauty of art can also be judged by its scope. The greatest beauty tends to encompass most; the artworks of largest importance frequently have within them the widest diversity....This is so, I think, because most of life seems shapeless most of the time, and the art that squares with this powerful impression seems most convincingly to confront disagreeable fact."