The appreciation of visual beauty is not all a given, sprung like Wisdom from Jove's brow full-grown. Like the appreciation of other arts, whether classical music or literature, our appreciation of visual beauty changes with experience. It deepens, it gains breadth. There is conventional beauty like a girl's pretty face or flowers or sunset and then there is art which comprises both the natural impulse and a contrived infrastructure of history, criticism and philosophy hat sets the foundation on which we can build our own work.
Shooting Greg yesterday changed my experience of what can be beautiful in photography. I didn't experiment as much as I wanted to with lighting although I did light him more sparingly to bring out the lines of the body and give more dimensionality. What I found most effective was to ask him to adopt postures he normally didn't use. Changing the arrangement of our bodies must affect our minds and emotions, too. Unfamiliar poses or poses dictated by someone else (the art director, for instance) can bring out a more spontaneous, more sincere response in us.
The body was my focus yesterday. This was also the first time I'd African-American models. The shade of skin was compelling. I saw body and face in a different light. It was liberating! There is beauty in more places in our experience that we have dreamt of. Maybe beauty is more an attitude and anything we experience with an aesthetic attitude is beautiful. Beauty is simply an attempt to capture the infinite faces of natural creation. With eyes attuned to finding it, we see the world as through lenses, abounding in beauty. Shapes and colors spring into patterns we call images and sometimes when the conjunction of lines, contrast, and color is particularly fortuitous we have something mythic, images that seem to draw from the deep psychic wells of our being. Mythic images bear messages from the depth that change with the person seeking them, the circumstances, the times. They remind us of the ground we stand on. From skimming helplessly in heaven we find a foothold in the immensely moving cosmos.
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