Diminishing Beauty

Beauty literally stops me in my tracks. It can annoy my wife when she’s in the car because I’ll hit the brakes unexpectedly, pull over, and reach into the back seat for my camera. It might happen anywhere and if I don’t capture that right away it can fade in minutes or even seconds. Photography is about light after all, and light is often transitory, especially with scattered clouds and a storm either building or breaking up. A shaft of light will illuminate something against a dark background and I have a brief window in which to get the shot. By the time I’ve stepped out of the vehicle, turned on the camera and framed the image, a cloud may have blocked the sun and the opportunity passes.

When I am successful though and I pull up the image later on my computer, it’s a great feeling. The photos I like best all convey whatever feeling I had when I saw the scene. If the photo kindles a similar feeling in others it will sell. The ones I’ve been paid for are images of things — landscapes, street scenes, coastal scenes, loons, sunsets, and so forth. Images of my loved ones are among my favorites but I don’t put them on the website. One did get on accidentally once when I was re-sizing a batch of coastal scenes and a shot of my grandchildren looking for crabs on a beach got mixed in somehow. I didn’t realize it until someone ordered a collection of photos and I pulled up the full-resolution version of that shot from my computer. Now it hangs in a northern Maine nursing home.

Shots of my grandchildren when they’re young convey an innocence that has universal appeal. Young children are genuine; they lack pretense. With a zoom lens they don’t usually know I’m photographing them. They see me with a camera so often that they’re seldom self-conscious about it. When they become teenagers, however, that natural, unaffected demeanor fades. They’re not sure who they are themselves and that uncertainty comes through in photos — especially when they know I’m shooting in their direction. Almost never do I ask people to pose because I much prefer candid shots.

All imagery interests me, but especially other photographs. Again, my taste runs toward candid. We’re all bombarded by photos of men and women with physical beauty, but when photographed for advertising purposes they lose their charm. Subjects are paid to be pretentious. In my eyes, that disingenuousness comes through more strongly than anything else the advertiser intends. It’s worse when the models’ affectations have a sexual bent which is increasingly the case.

Often we see photographers following subjects in revealing dress and snapping away as the models try to look alluring. They strike various poses with ostentatious “come hither” expressions. Such scenes are meant to convey the alleged glamour of high fashion but it never works for me. The fakery is so obvious I can never get past it. It must work with most viewers though because that sort of advertising is ubiquitous. Some could be called soft porn, and it is always pushing limits of propriety.

And pornography which no one could call soft has become dangerously widespread with the internet. Images depicting sex without love would define it, and in my youth, Playboy Magazine was considered porn. It might not be labeled such today because still photographs of the Playboy type have given way to digital video. It’s a plague the young and old contract with the cell phones in every pocket. As with drugs and alcohol, pornography is addictive. Continued use requires stronger doses to reproduce the initial thrill and teenagers today produce their own with cell phone cameras. Our culture is increasingly coarsened in the process. Porn destroys relationships from teenage romances to marriages and professional counselors warn us there’s no end in sight.

Consumers are mostly male but females are catching up. A 2011 article the UK Guardian claimed one in three users were female and 17% of women were addicted. Porn actors degrade themselves and watchers degrade themselves vicariously. How widespread is pornography? Statistics vary: anywhere from 15-75% of Americans use it regularly. Extensive revelations of Jeffrey Epstein’s rich and powerful associates abusing underage girls seem to mirror trends in porn users toward child porn, the only kind that’s still illegal.

For how long will it remain so? That depends on how much society values the innocence of youth. Will Epstein Attorney Alan Dershowitz prevail in his arguments to lower the age of consent? Will Republican congressmen persuade Attorney General William Barr to prosecute internet porn producers more vigorously? There are forces at work both pushing and pulling.

Beauty, defined as: “a combination of qualities that pleases the intellect or moral sense,” is becoming endangered when seeing images of fellow human beings. Beautiful landscapes, however, remain plentiful.

Too Much Information

Every day I get emails from news aggregators, those individuals and organizations who scan the news day and night and select links to what they think I should know. I signed up for them but I cannot read them all. There’s not enough time in the day — and if there was, I don’t have the energy. I have to delete some each day without reading them and I feel guilty when I do that. I feel I’m missing something I should know.

There was a time I thought it was possible to get at least a cursory understanding of anything and everything. Long ago I learned that’s not possible, but sometimes I forget. As a boy, I read newspapers, magazines, and  books of all types. My father subscribed to The Boston Globe, The Lowell Sun, Time, Newsweek, US News and World Report, National Geographic, and others. Occasionally, I’d see a Playboy left in the woods. The library was just over a mile away. I also purchased comic books and Superman was my favorite. Then there was a collection of Classics Illustrated — abridged, edited, comic-book formatted classic books like “Last of the Mohicans”; “Moby Dick”; “Silas Marner”; and many others. There was never a lack of things to read. It was a rich environment for a boy who wanted to learn about the world, past and present.

And I was sent to school — Catholic schools from second grade through high school. There I was taught many things, including the long history of the Catholic Church — the oldest, continually-functioning institution on earth. After that, I attended various colleges and earned degrees. All during that time, I took lessons from the school of hard knocks and I have the scars to prove it.

Understanding the present is difficult enough but then I was a history teacher. I had to help students make sense of the human past and relate it to the present. Courses were chunked into specific places and time spans but that didn't make it much easier really. There was the stuff we know happened, but what did it mean? It was humbling.

Since the late 20th century, I’ve used the internet to supplement my information gathering, but I have mixed feelings about it. My laptop has become the primary way I interact with the world beyond family, and sometimes with family as well through texts, email, and social media. I’m using it now to write this. Soon I’ll send it out for publication in various places, hard copy and digital.

In my pocket is another device with which I can tap the worldwide web, but I prefer my laptop because I don’t like typing with my thumbs, because the laptop is faster, and because its screen is bigger. I can’t remember the last time I looked online for information and didn’t find it. Can you? So, nearly all of us have something in our pockets that can reveal to us almost any kind of facts we may be looking for.

But is this access making us wiser? Better citizens? Better people? Not from my perspective it isn’t. For many of us, the information we’re looking for isn’t edifying. For some, it’s gossipy. For others, it’s prurient. Online, there’s always an option to go in a different direction. We may have originally been searching for edification, but were distracted and taken somewhere else. 

That’s not possible when we’re reading a book. Turn the page and we go where the author wants to take us, and if we chose the book wisely, that’s a positive direction. We can put the book down and pick up some kind of pulp, but it has to be readily available. To read a Playboy growing up, I would have to close whatever I was reading, go out into the woods, look for it, and it probably wouldn’t be there. Online in the 21st century, hooks are everywhere. If someone nibbles, more is just a compulsive click away. We must choose not to bite. When laptops with wireless internet were issued to all my students during my last years teaching, use of social media or accessing pornography were forbidden, but it was difficult to monitor, especially because they could be taken home. Compared to Playboy of my youth, pornography available to children today is shockingly evil.

Even without distractions, it’s not possible to learn all we want to know. There’s simply too much information available at our fingertips now. We’re nearly always on overload. and we don’t take time to process, and our online experience tends to be solitary. Someone may put a phone under our eyes wanting us to watch something, but how often do we discuss it? How much time do we spend just thinking about it? Not nearly enough would be my guess. Instead, we're always looking for more.

All this is taking us all somewhere, but exactly where is anybody’s guess.