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December 30, 2008
Tony Frouse is an Ottawa based photographer who has a blog called Drool. He has a post on beauty at Slightly Lucid that caught my eye.
Referring to the work of James Nachtwey and Simon Norfolk that picks up on a remark Norfolk made about beauty being a tactic. Frouse comments:
The idea of turning war photos (or any photos of human suffering) into beautiful commodities raises all kinds of issues. But this one phrase, “beauty is a tactic”, neatly tips the discussion into more positive territory.I believe that beauty reaches farther into the human psyche than almost anything else. I also believe that these photographers photographs have a certain quality that elevates them, that makes them worth, somehow, more than standard press photos of carnage, mayhem and horror; press photos that get consumed in one sitting and are thrown out with the garbage the next day.In order to get people to look and to react to the state of the world these days new tactics must be employed. Beauty is one of them.
I find this puzzling. beauty, as an aesthetic category, has been understood by modernists to be part of the object, in the sense of significant form. Form is one aspect of what makes a photograph stand the test of time and what makes it art. From this perspective I cannot see why beauty is problematic in photography--it is an aspect of our aesthetic judgment about a particular photograph. That does not mean that beauty is, or should be, central to art and aesthetics.
The other interpretation of Frouse's comment is that it is a case of photojournalists adding to their aesthetic category---including beauty alongside truth? This is their way of defending their work from criticism that they were beautifying" or "aestheticizing" the suffering caused by war, famine, or forced dislocation. This---images aestheticizing violence--- is more the likely interpretation , given that Susan Sontag wrote and worried, about beautiful suffering.
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The old aesthetic debates around modernism were about beauty. Conservatives held that the contemporary conservative movement came into existence partly in reaction to the inhumanity of modernism and the shocking moral depths to which the decadent culture has fallen. Thus:
We still echoes of this debate today.