Romanticism in the nineteenth century was a protest against the dark satanic mills of industrial modernity, utilitarian calculation and market capitalism conducted in the name of beauty, or wilderness. This understanding of Romanticism is what shaped my photography when I was teaching myself to shoot black and white photos with a 5 X 7 view camera in, and around, Bowden, Mile End and Port Adelaide in South Australia. This was a world characterized by industrial decay as South Australia was undergoing de-industrialzation.

Today some argue that beauty, which can be found in the most unexpected places in every day life, functions as a tacit critique of the slick advertising and crass commercialism in the business districts of the city. Or the contrast would be between those who sell minerals and see only their mercantile value and the artist who sees the beauty of the stones.

Bowden rose, originally uploaded by poodly.

On this account capitalism has, by default, become the primary lens through which we interpret the world. From within the profit-driven perspectives of capitalism, a world-view more widespread than any other in history, all things are squeezed into financial concepts and therefore look like exchangeable commodities.

It is argued that beauty transgresses this world view, as beauty is what is left over when everyday life is squeezed into the market concepts in a world of universal commodification. The remainder to conceptualisation now becomes an enigmatic object of study rather than being denied or ignored.

The claim, which goes back to Kant's Critique of Judgement, is that something could be ultimately meaningful without regard to its instrumental value. or to put in another way things have auratic individuality because of their very particularity. Beauty, on this account, is the doorway to other concepts such as imagination, feeling, sensibility, sublime. The sensuous and particular experience of art now reveals a form of knowledge more complex than the categories of instrumental reason can contain.