triptych # 24 (kitchen life / civilized ku / ku) ~ what is beauty (in photography)

the gruel radiance of what is ~ various locations • click to embiggen

My apologies to Robert Adams for co-opting the title of his book, Beauty in Photography (link is to a review of the book), which is a collection of Adams' essays on picture making. A book which, IMO, should be a mandatory read for anyone with a camera who aspires to making pictures which are more than snapshots.

Over the years, I have read and re-read the book, in whole or part, a number of times. As my picture making worked has matured, along with my understanding of it (and the why of it), the essays in the book most often reveal, not unlike good pictures, new understandings with the re-visiting of them.

As the title of the book implies, Adams has wrestled with the notion of beauty and as my picturing making moved from primarily commercial work to that of personal / fine art work, I too struggled with the word and the notion of beauty. However, one thing I knew from the start was that I had no interest in making pictures which conformed to the bourgeoisie idea of beauty or, as I labeled them, pretty pictures. Adams' take on the idea was/is spot on with mine:

Beauty seemed to me then an obsolete word .... what had the term to do with the realities of the this century?

Now to be certain, I came across Adams' words long after I decided that I was drawn to and wanted to make pictures of the "realities" of my 7/10 of a century which pricked my eye and sensibilities or, as James Agee stated, "the cruel radiance of what is". Or, as I wrote over 8 years ago at the start of this blog, photography that aims at being true, not at being beautiful because what is true is most often beautiful.

Adams wrote that photography, more than any other art, is tied to (the) use of specifics or, as I have written (many times over the years) that the single characteristic of the medium of photography which distinguishes from the other visual arts is its inexorable and intrinsic attribute as a cohort of the real. So, that being the case, the driving force (preternatural?) of my desire to make pictures has been to plumb the depths of any and all of specifics of the world without regard to their adherence to commonly perceived status of conventional beauty.

All of that written, as I have continued on my picture making path and despite my initial aversion to the word beauty, I have learned, as Adams wrote:

... the word beauty is in practice unavoidable. Its very centrality accounts, in fact, for my decision to make photographs.