The Beauty Search

I found a word list I made in 1993. Sandwiched between the words across four pages of college-ruled paper were poets and authors, artists, photographers, and John Ford, the playwright.

The words with definitions span physics, medicine, psychology, philosophy, and natural history. Not sure why playwright John Ford is towards the end of the four pages.

Except for the idea that his plays deal mainly with the conflict between passion and conscience. Most of his poems on themes of love and morality haven’t survived. Perhaps “Can you paint a thought?” the first line of “Beauty’s Beauty” pulled me into the poem exploring the transcendent nature of beauty and by extension, photography.

I’ve always considered that the process of making photographs is both sublime and transcendent. Photography’s essence is so profound and overpowering that it goes beyond human comprehension and control just as Ford espouses in the poem.

The poem is a challenge to consider the nature of beauty, the ways we try to capture it, and why it remains such a powerful force in our culture and consciousness.

Making photographs is the result of studying our surroundings, our connections, and our experiences. Photographs give us an understanding of the moments that arrive in that study as we struggle to find the transcendent representation of our experiences.

That’s why photographers rarely refuse an assignment, even if it repeats a previous one. It's another opportunity to capture that beautiful moment in the now familiar. Beauty in “all fate, all story, all arms, all arts, all loves, all hearts,”

Finding beauty is essential and always just out of reach.

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