Ugly photos?
Last week I had a new thought: why do we always try to take beautiful photos of people and nature? You know what I mean, those spectacular sunsets, astonishing macros, and heart-rendering smiles of our children (for which I am definitely guilty) . Sometimes the chase for that perfect photo seems to go on forever, leaving us unsatisfied with what we actually have accomplished.
So today I am rebelling. No more of that cutesy, mushy stuff where everything has to look perfect. Today I am going after those ugly shot.
It’s interesting, you know, that putting up these photos has given me some new thoughts. The first thing I learned is that if you’re looking for ugly things, they are so easy to find; you don’t even have to look for them, because they seem to be all around. Searching for beautiful things, on the other hand, takes a bit of effort, and is all together bound to a different attitude. We call that optimism.
The photographer in me likes that word. Optimism is basically what drives me to take photos – even in this kind of strange exercise above. Because the great challenge for a photographer is learning to see beauty even in the unattractive. Today I had set out to show some ugly photos – and some of them were just that – but if I think about it, some were rather cool as well.
That’s why I like this quote by Ambrose Bierce: “Optimism. The doctrine or belief that everything is beautiful, including what is ugly.”
So this is the second lesson of the day, that everything beheld is always in the eyes of the beholder. We see what we want to see. Here’s another good quote to illustrate that: “Only in relation to our imagination can things be called beautiful or ugly…” (Benedict Spinoza)
How about that! 🙂