Among the plenitude of concepts that may be associated with the tangible materials of life, beauty and truth are two constantly revisited by critics as well as artists in the traditions traceable back to Greek sculpture and polychromes, narrative and lyric and dramatic verse, philosophy and math. They are ideas, given forms in idealizations that, in turn and over millennia, get codified, redefined, expanded, destroyed, reassembled. We know what happens when mere fragments of their invisible essence are converted into competing orthodoxies—on a small personal scale, friendships may be damaged; at larger scales, millions of beings lose the life that was precious for reasons reason did not need to know.
Everybody loves beauty, but once they start discussing what is or is not important about it, slings and arrows are likely to follow. By then they may really be arguing about what is true or what truth is, using all sorts of conceptual and emotional proxies.
Our visions and beliefs of what constitutes Cosmos may differ not only from the assumptions of our neighbors and colleagues, but from earlier versions of what we believed ourselves to be and to value. Why shouldn’t a rational being evolve their vision of which forms of matter represent beauty and which experiences are more and less important?
Cosmos at a personal level is perceiving durable truths about what beauty is, was, and may yet be within a mortal lifespan. The same applies to Chaos. Robert Frank was, in a notable sense, driven to depict the sorrows and pities of people who could not stop moving until they were wrecked on a homeless roadside. Ansel Adams depicts landscapes in the same country as though no human has ruined it and no genocides have occurred there. And while those are two acknowledged masters of photography, consider how many more photographic visions might be required to truly compile a Godseye view of what is beautiful, in feeling and structure, and what may be both important and true, however heartbreaking or indifferent.
In a piece I published decades ago—originally as a piece of criticism about an artist using dioramas to depict social chaos—, I portrayed hell as a place where the dead stand face to face, unable to stop talking about their mistakes and unable to listen to anyone else’s babble. For this topic, I’d extend the definition to include photographers whose thoughts keep revolving around the premise “I’m important,” and the ways in which that blinds and deafens them to using the camera to learn how to see more deeply and broadly beyond themselves.
