One of the central memes in photographic culture is the general acceptance that photography's central concern is beauty-----whether this is interpreted as in terms of aesthetic experience of the viewer or the Platonic idea that beauty is a property of objects that is independent of the viewer's appreciative response. This acceptance of traditional values is at a time when beauty as an artistic value has not been at the centre of art practical or criticism since the mid 20th century.

Robert Adams in his influential essay "Beauty in Photography” adopts the latter position, when he asserts that “beauty” is another word for the coherence and structure underlying life and the beauty that concerns the artist is one of this structure or “Form" that can help us to meet our worst fear, the suspicion that life may be chaos and that therefore our suffering is without meaning”. Beauty in art (Form) helps us to deal with loss, grief and death in the real world.

This account holds that “art takes liberties to reveal Form”; or imposes an order on the scene though simplifies the jumble by giving the chaos some structure. Order and form (beauty) – is then equated with meaning. The opposite of beauty is chaos, formlessness, and meaninglessness.

There is a lot of support for Adam's position that Beauty is a synonym for the coherence and structure underlying life.” Plato’s definition of beauty – unity, regularity, and simplicity – reflects qualities of our most valued scientific theories when stated in a mathematical form. The archetypes of beauty –geometric patterns of order – are reflected throughout nature: in a snowflake, a leaf, a solar system. Science seeks to understand nature, and when natural patterns of order are revealed, scientists believe they have uncovered a truth.

We can begin to loosen this duality up by remarking that the ugly may be just as true as the beautiful. So may the awful and the sublime, which is characterized by boundlessness and formlessness. If beautiful pictures are not inherently any more true than ugly ones, then many beautiful photographs are manipulated, showing a falsified vision of reality, and so depicting the world through rose colored glasses. National Geographic, for instance, has often been criticized for only presenting the sunnier side of life due to its preference for strikingly beautiful images.

So photographs can still be considered beautiful in form even when the subject matter (the content, eg., the horror of dead in a war) is ugly. A beautiful form is not enough to suggest truth or to reveal meaning, even though form can have meaning. If modernism treats a photograph as an image containing meaning, then postmodernism sees a photograph as a cultural object in a visual culture whose meaning arises from how the photograph is used and written about.