Beauty in art has to be rooted in life. For me this means that, to offer us the nourishment we seek in beauty, a photograph can’t look staged or contrived. I use the word “look” because a picture should not only be but also appear to be authentic. Our default expectation is that a photograph – any photograph – will be a record, so even a beautiful photograph is first (though not foremost) a report of historical fact. Its affirming power hangs on the unstated premise, which is also a promise, that this is what life is like. If we see that pledge violated in a photograph, its value to us as an assertion that life is more than a meaningless blur is reduced to nothing. That assertion will fall on deaf ears, its visual embodiment on blind eyes, if it isn’t a plausible depiction of uncontrived fact. So I aspire to photograph beauty where I find it; I am less interested in posing the world, you might say, with the aim of staging beauty just so that I may photograph it. The strained, awkward effect of a visibly staged picture kills any chance it might otherwise have of being beautiful. Strain and awkwardness also go against Robert Adams’s point that a photograph’s success can be measured in part by “the apparent ease of its execution”. He says, “An artwork should not appear to have been hard work. I emphasize ‘appear’ because certainly no artwork is easy to make.” Only with this "apparent ease of execution", he says, can a work of art "suggest that Beauty is commonplace."



The last three words bear repeating: Beauty is commonplace. If it weren’t – if it could be found only in some ideal world – it would hardly have much in the way of illumination or consolation to offer us in ours.



But if beauty is commonplace, why do we need an artist to bring it home to us? Because though beauty is everywhere, it’s hiding, camouflaged, in plain sight, or being swept past us on time’s torrent. It’s the artist’s paradoxical role to detain the flow of time and, precisely by presenting beauty in a frame of reference of his or her choosing, to liberate it from the confines randomly set for it by everyday life. G.K. Chesterton said, “Art, like morality, consists of drawing the line somewhere.” And: "All my life I have loved edges; and the boundary line that brings one thing sharply against another. All my life I have loved frames and limits; and I will maintain that the largest wilderness looks larger seen through a window. To the grief of all grave dramatic critics, I will still assert that the perfect drama must strive to the higher ecstasy of the peepshow."

The artist who most literally arrests time in its heedless rush and isolates beauty from its chance everyday surroundings – framing it, throwing it into relief, revealing and preserving it for our contemplation – is the photographer.



.......After cropping, perhaps the most common revisions involve tonal manipulation. We want to see, and a picture gains force from showing us, the full range of tones that the camera has recorded. They’re no good to us bleached out in arid expanses of white, or drowned in bottomless pools of black. Eliciting, subduing, teasing out those tones in the darkroom or on the computer – all these are fair game in making a beautiful photograph. “Dodging and burning,” Ansel Adams said, “are steps to take care of mistakes God made in establishing tonal relationships.”




At least on the surface, though, just as the apparent ease of a beautiful photograph’s execution is, in Robert Adams’s word, a “deception”, what we glean from art is something of an illusion. Art is not life itself because it is, for lack of a better term, exceptionalist. In its pursuit of the truth, it asks us to turn our attention to this, the work of art, which by definition excludes everything else – that – in a way that life itself doesn’t. In life, that is always butting in. A beautiful photograph is a distillation of the exceptional from the commonplace, of the ordinary into the extraordinary. It leads our eye, intellect and soul to a reality above the everyday, yielding delights that are not on offer in the general run of life.