Overview
Opening Reception: Thursday May 17 from 5 - 7 pm
Photography Symposium: Saturday, May 19 from 9 am - noon
at the Museum (cost $10/person)
Beauty is a word more often associated with pageant contestants and scenic views than with the photographs seen in contemporary art museums these days. But, while judging the imagery in this exhibition, the word Beauty kept coming to mind. The beauty that I found in the photographs was more visual than intellectual and more of the senses than of the type associated with solutions to mathematical problems. These images provide the viewer with a sense of pleasure and invite contemplation of the nature of beauty.
Plato believed that for one to perceive beauty, the concept of it had to be embedded in one's mind already. Often the motivation for photographers to take up artistic image-making is the desire to develop and translate their embedded sense of beauty into prints. Just as often, they are at first disappointed that the original perception does not match the resulting image, and thus they advance toward developing both their sense of beauty as well as their understanding of craft. The photographers whose works have been selected for this exhibition have both a profound sense of beauty as well as the craft to reveal it. Photographer Robert Adams said it best: “Beauty is in practice unavoidable. Its very centrality accounts, in fact, for my decision to photograph.”
Although the beauty of a photograph often has been ascribed to the camera employed rather than to the photographer, it is really a product of the mind—that of the maker as well as of the viewer. Throughout photographic history, many have thought that the best photographs were a product of an exceptionally fine camera, or lens, or special powers that image makers have over their subjects. Alfred Stieglitz, wrote his famous essay How I Came to Photograph Clouds to dispel such illusions. He said: ‘ I wanted to photograph clouds to find out what I had learned in 40 years…Through clouds to put down my philosophy of life—to show that my photographs were not due to subject matter—not to special trees, or faces, or interiors, to special privileges—clouds were there for everyone—no tax as yet on them—free.” He wanted people to be excited by his creations not the technique or technology that made them. The photographs that I judged for the exhibition, indeed, call attention to the imagery and not the mechanics, a virtue in our technology dominated era.
The photographs selected also demonstrate that beauty is not subject matter but successful imagery. By its nature, photography is generally more referential than other media to subject matter, and, therefore, subject matter would seem to play a much more important role in determining the beauty of a particular image. However, photographs that are beautiful include not only those whose subjects are considered beautiful, but also those whose subjects must be made beautiful. Flowers, butterflies, and misty mornings certainly would seem to be candidates for inherently beautiful photographs, while trash-strewn streets, rubble, and chaos would seem to require intervention. The truth is, though, there are no beautiful subjects of photographs, only beautiful photographs of subjects. A subject photographed poorly is not beautiful, and one photographed beautifully makes for a highly successful image.
No consideration of beauty would be substantial without mention of John Keats’s immortal lines from “Ode on a Grecian Urn”: “Beauty is truth, truth beauty—that is all Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.” For Keats, these words were self evident, particularly in regard to the urn, but also in regard to life. The beauty on the urn is unchanging, and in life it should be as absolute as truth. As Keats seems to say, beauty is and should be readily recognizable, truth not always is. The equation that he draws between the two is almost mathematical.
While this exhibition is not mathematical, the beauty of the works is quite evident and nearly as calculable. Additionally, the success of the imagery selected for the exhibition reveals that beauty is necessary to the photographers. The pursuit of beauty is their way of making images that are true to themselves.
“Beauty is the universal seen,” said Alfred Stieglitz. He was defining his approach to making, understanding, and appreciating photographs, but he might well have been setting a standard for art making by all future photographers. Stieglitz considered that photography was one of the “great affirmers of life” and that there was scarcely “any object, in all the world without high import.” Beauty could be found everywhere. Each of Stieglitz’s photographs affirmed life, declared “the majesty of the moment,” and showed us his time—just as the photographs in this exhibition do for us.
Tom Beck
Exhibit Juror