What Is Beauty?

Beauty Is Within

Beauty is the most discredited philosophical notion—so discredited that I could not even find an entry for it in the index of the many books in the philosophy of art I consulted in order to find it discredited.

-- Alexander Nehamas

... not what you were looking for, I know, but something that you might want to be aware of.

Beauty can be a very personal judgment, as evidenced by the images that you have chosen to show at the start.

Beauty would be when my art sells. Which would be........???

Dave

@Robert, thanks for the quotation by Alexander Nehamas

It's a good one!

I chose the pictures on purpose to be controversial to the common perception of beauty.

I could have well chosen this one...


..but this is a "postcard" photo which has certainly a "beauty" in itself but doesn't hold as much for us as the other pictures.

--Elena

The notion of beauty is highly subjective, all you can do is suggest your own view and hope you will find people who agree with you and who can become your followers. You can't possibly please everyone or fugure out what beauty means to any single person. Also, your images do not appear controversial, they are pleasing enough and I can see that quite a few people will find them beautiful as well. If you are looking for controversy you may want to go for something more edgy. Of course, it all depends on what you are trying to achieve in the end. Best of luck with your project!

Raisa

I chose the pictures on purpose to be controversial to the common perception of beauty.

That's sort of a relief, because my first impulse was to tell you that none of those images evoked the idea of "beauty" in me, ... hence my comment about personal judgment, ... trying to be less harsh about it, but now that I know your intent, I can tell you flat out that none of those first images evoked the idea of "beauty" in me. (^_^)

"Beauty is not in the eye of the beholder, but in the eye of the imaginative." (TMurray)

Ask people to define beauty and you will get mostly superficial responses. Ask people to show you what they find beautiful and you get a much deeper idea. I believe true beauty provokes an emotional response. Believing this drives me to photograph things that inspire that emotional response in me and present them in a way that conveys that emotion. Admittedly, I don't always succeed. In fact, probably more often than not, I don't. But it's always what I'm striving for. And, even when I do succeed, it's still only beautiful to a select number of people.

Let's follow Loree's suggestion... Share with us what your understanding of beauty is.... Show it!... please always with a (famous or less famous) quote or proverb to make a point.

--Elena

re. emotional response... unexpectedly for us this picture causes a quite strong emotional response from our friends

"When we contemplate the whole globe as one great dewdrop, striped and dotted with continents and islands, flying through space with other stars all singing and shining together as one, the whole universe appears as an infinite storm of beauty." --John Muir

Beauty is not a “thing”, but a “then”, not a “what”, but a “when”. It is when liquid bodies (well attuned) sense their harmonic alignment with the greater cosmic sea.
-- Robert G. Kernodle ... from my essay ... H E R E

Loree,

I agree with what you said.

Earlier this afternoon Radio Labs on NPR did a show on being blind.
They interviewed to very different blindmen.

One would not lie to his wife, he could not see her or anything at all. Not even imagine anything at all.

The other had a dad who worked in Australia as a top executive in the film industry. So at a very young age
while he could still read, his hobby had been reading screenplays and imagining different worlds. He lost his sight completely
in his early twenties, a small industrial accident. He began to imagine everything that entered his world. He could see in his mind only
so well that he even would get up on his roof and fix any leaks, put up the new gutter system etc......He knew his wife's face.

The radio show got these two guys to debate their beliefs about the mind's eye. It was very interesting.

The biggest point by the blindman who imaged everything that entered his life so as to see everything in very real terms was he thought
humans were so responsive to images it was emotionally perhaps the biggest part of how humans interact.

The insight was profound to me.

Dave

Senses... we only start appreciating them after we lose them.

I lost my smell after an accident, and only then I realised how important smell was for my life... memories... relationships... All gone! Smell of the sea... Smell of fresh cut grass... Smell of the forest...

There was only one option to move forward... to replace this loss with visual stimulations. I now perceive the world different than ever before, and our photographs probably show this a little.

--Elena

Interesting discussion. The concept of beauty is only real to us as individuals. There can never be a consensus -- or anything near that. '... the eye of the beholder' is a cliche springing from absolute truth.

"I don’t like standard beauty — there is no beauty without strangeness."
~ Karl Lagerfeld

I do appreciate 'standard' beauty, but am equally intrigued by strange beauty. I've been told that both of these images are 'ugly'. I not-so-humbly beg to differ, and would be comfortable displaying them in even the most 'beautiful' surroundings.

A motif can have beauty and make us feel the beauty in it.

But what triggers that sense of beautyness?

Looking at a photograph, there are shapes, lines, colors...

Do we add something to these visual elements to see the beauty or are the visual elements in a particular set already the beauty?

Beauty makes me feel a part of something bigger, something outside of myself, something made more beautiful when shared with someone special.

Beauty washes over you

It may be a warm flow

A cool bracing shower

or a

A hot steamy blast

....................Roger Swezey