The following is an excerpt from the book On Being a Photographer by David Hurn and Bill Jay. You can easily replace the word photography with the art form of your choice – music, painting, writing, etc. David Hurn’s comment triggers a question with an infinite number of answers. What is beauty?
For many people the word beauty is associated with the predictable – pictures previously seen and already in their memory banks, cliche images of sunsets, small furry animals, pin-ups, postcard views, and so on. For me, the most great photographs displaying beauty reveal a sensation of strangeness, not predictability, a kind of shock non-recognition inside the familiar. They are not the opposite of cliches; they have a quality beyond the visually obvious. But even if it is difficult to define, beauty still lurks behind the the scenes.
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