I’m looking for the beauty in our world. I’m looking for the painting that’s right there in front of me, ready-made, if only I can notice it. I’m trying to be a photojournalist of beauty without editorializing or manipulating the image as it is.
I don’t use photoshop or filters. I will crop an image to get the composition I’m after.
I may gently enhance the colors that are already present, without adding or subtracting any. In the same way, I may nudge the image to be slightly darker or lighter. These are small and subtle changes, but they matter.
Ansel Adams is well known for saying that in the realm of traditional analog photography, the negative is like a musical score and the print is the performance of that score. If you begin with a mediocre score the performance can only do so much. If you begin with an exceptional score the performance should add life and nuance without major alterations.
It’s the same for digital photography as it is for analog photography. Some of my photographs are on film. Most now are digital. But my approach is the same. I aim to capture the best original image without the need for major alterations in the print.
I am especially fascinated by the effects of nature, primarily weather, and human use on built structures. Structures that began with clean uniform surfaces become worn over time. The randomness of wear generates its own abstract beauty. The once monochromatic and uniform surface becomes multi-colored and textured without any human intention. To my eye, in some places, if you search for it, a great depth and magnetic power is revealed. It’s a hidden treasure you must search to discover and then carefully capture before it changes.
It is the documentation of change that may look like mundane and unsightly deterioration. Yet on closer inspection something precious and worthy of appreciation emerges. The Japanese have an aesthetic term, ‘sabi’, that applies.
“ ‘Sabi’ is the loss of what sparkles in us, the fleeting nature of beauty. Sabi things carry the burden of aging with dignity and grace.” - Manpreet Toor-
The sparkly beauty of newness fades. It is temporary. New things acquire the quality of sabi, of age and wear. Sabi is more lasting than the sheen of the new. Perhaps it is the more lasting quality of worn built surfaces that attracts me. Without constant human intervention, the wear will continue, and perhaps, if you look just right, the beauty deepens.
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Unless you can see the beauty all around you everywhere, and enjoy it, you can never comprehend art.
-Willa Cather-
Attentiveness to beauty is the instrument of transcendence.
-Maria Popova-
Cezanne…used art to give form to the process of seeing the world, individually, with both eyes and brain…you can’t change anything, not in your society, and not in your atmosphere, unless you first give it form…form is the difference between what you scroll past and what lasts. Form is how things you see become things that matter, investing even the daily haul from the green grocer with the force of truth.
-Jason Farago-
It maybe, in fact, that empathy and the eye are the twin triumphs of evolution…The very concept of empathy as we know it was born in the early 20th century to describe the experience of projecting oneself into a work of art.
Why be alive at all, if not to relish the ecstasy of noticing, that crowning glory of our consciousness.
-Maria Popova-