Aesthetics beyond the image

Opening questions: What is beauty? What is elegance? What is ugliness? What is refinement? What’s the difference between functionality and art? What do we prefer one object over another, given choice, and identical function/ consumption of resources? These are not easy questions to answer: they require us to address fundamental challenges of not just personal preference, but also identity. We like something because we choose it over something else; we find that beautiful but that preference is a consequence of personal biases, needs, requirements and ultimately – experiences which make our personality and preferences the way they are. Yet our instinctive responses to things are often both immediate and quite strong: the like or dislike is established within moments of contact, and whilst prolonged exposure might breed some latitude born of understanding and tolerance, it’s unlikely to change love into hate. I want to address a very difficult set of questions today: what is the aesthetic sense? How can it be developed? Does it matter for photography, and if so, how does it make us better (or worse)?

I’ve always thought of a sense of aesthetics much the same as a sense of smell or taste or sight; unlike those physically-based properties, the aesthetic sense is not quantitatively measurable. You either taste something or you don’t; you can either read the letters on the sixth line or you can’t. But the ability to discern beauty is perhaps graded only by degrees. I think it boils down to one’s calibration of balance; it ties in to the ability to assign visual weight to elements and judge if they are harmonious or not. It requires an ability to see beyond the physicality of the subject or element or thing – and an innate spatial sense to assess homogeneity, density and distribution of information. For example, whether a curve looks ‘right’ or not can also be thought of in those terms – is the distribution of information (i.e. curvature) progressive in a way that keeps the viewer entertained? Or is it jarring and conflicting with one’s expectations? Note: visual non-sequiturs can be good if they don’t continually throw the audience off balance and result in visual discomfort.

Or perhaps it’s the ability to compare the immediate object, subject or presentation with a large mental database of other similar objects – and assess similarities and how they fared the test of time. This of course falls down when presented with a completely new class of object or something that does not fit existing expectations for an object – the first iPhone was a good example of this. It was widely acclaimed as a masterpiece of design, even though there was no precedent for a telephone of this type (or any other other object, for that matter). Assessment of the success of a design is much easier than that of aesthetics: if the object comfortably and simply fulfils its function reliably, then the design can be said to be successful. If it happens to be pleasing to the eye, then that’s a bonus – I can think of many tools that are great pieces of design but will never win any beauty contests. But why is this? Surely there must be some merit in form following function.

Let’s take cameras, for example: I can think of several designs that are widely considered ‘classics’, ‘beautiful’, and certainly ‘lustworthy’. Do they all fulfil the function, part, however? No. The Leica M is a good example of this: undoubtedly a design that has been refined through decades, unfortunately just not for the current digital function paradigm. Yet I’ll be the first to admit that it’s rather sexy – even it proves to be less than optimal in practice. At the opposite end of the scale, we have the Pentax 645Z: it honestly is something only an engineer or myopic mother could love aesthetically, yet it has one of the most sensible and easy to use user interfaces of any camera. It carries no lust factor whatsoever, except if you care solely about the sensor and price-performance ratio. The first example is of a design whose aesthetics landed up compromising function – and the latter of one where the function compromised aesthetics (or did perhaps aesthetics were not considered at all).

The same is true of art and photographs. Art that survives the test of time tends to be classifiable into one of two camps: extremely beautiful, or extremely ugly. Both are opposite ends of the same emotion, much the same as love or hate; there is little very famous historical art that raises a response of indifference from the majority of its audience. These two things go hand in hand: you’ve got to feel strongly about something to remember it, and something has to be remembered to survive the test of time. Oddly, the same is not quite true of photographs: a lot of early work of ‘historical merit’ is of questionable aesthetic value; those images often remind me of the old adage that a talking horse is of more interest because its mouth is moving in an intelligible manner rather than because of what it might be saying. They are significant because they were the first of of their kind and because there’s an image at all. Today’s bar is much higher: there’s so much very good and excellent work out there bombarding us from every single direction that an image that has any hope of being remembered for more than a couple of months – even by its creator – must really go above and beyond. And this is why we photographers need to train our sense of aesthetics.

I do believe it can be learned* – perhaps not necessarily taught, as there’s a good deal of personal bias involved, too. And I also believe that a honed sense of aesthetics and balance can improve our image making (at very least, our curation) because it enables us to decide what ‘works’ and what doesn’t in a much more decisive way, initially after capture, and eventually, also prior to it. We need to know what we like and why we like it before we can go out and find it, and in turn incorporate it into an image. The only real solution to this is of course exposure: we need to mindfully see a wide variety of images, objects, scenes, subjects and lighting situations and ask ourselves ‘yes or no?’ and more importantly, why – or why not. Hopefully, at this point we are also storing that assessment in our memories – so in future if we happen to encounter a certain direction and quality of light we like, then we should probably get the camera out. Even if we only do it vicariously in the form of assessing the images of others, it’s better than nothing. At least until we develop a strong style and preferences of our own.

*My wife will disagree. She claims she has been the sole redeeming influence on my own attire since we’ve met, which she finds inexplicable since my photographs and selections of other objects aren’t too bad.

Even if we do have strong stylistic preferences, I would still encourage looking at as wide a variety of work as possible – for the simple reason that you may well discover elements or techniques you hadn’t previously considered that you may be able to use to take your own style further; a good example of this would be postprocessing techniques, or compositional layout and spatial positioning of the various elements in the scene. I’ve chosen the illustrating images for the post deliberately: they’re all photographed in a fairly similar style, and ostensibly are all of the same class of subject, yet I’d be surprised if you liked every single image. The reason for this boils down to the specific subject itself: whilst the presentation style may be aesthetically pleasing, it’s independent of the actual subject itself. Not all of these buildings are beautiful; if anything, some are downright ugly – with clear purpose, but still ugly. (It’s also quite likely we have different taste in buildings, too.) There are others that are beautiful but functionally rather poor; we can also throw out the argument of functional beauty.

We as photographers can only control our subjects to the extent of inclusion or exclusion, quality of light and angle/perspective – the ability to change the physical form is beyond us (unlike, say, for a painter or sculptor). We are constrained by what exists – photoshop notwithstanding, and even then, there are limits before we cross the line into illustration. Yet we do not have to be constrained by the aesthetics of that particular specific subject: we still have enough control to be able to create beauty even out of the most mundane or ordinary or ugly physical object if we can train ourselves to a) identify preference and what trigger them, and b) condition ourselves to look at objects as pure form – light, shape, and color. Photography is often defined as the traditional Greek-derived ‘writing with light’ – yet I really think it’s the ability to reproduce a vision; the more open the vision, the more interesting the results. And with that, I leave you with some rather mundane – but I believe, beautiful – corrosion… MT

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