I admit it, I am a Dilbert follower. The creator of Dilbert, Scott Adams, has a blog where he recently posted an article about beauty as utility: Function as Beauty
As I read the article, it struck me as worthy of discussion by us photo folks. He talks a lot about his home-building project, but other than that, a lot of the discussion could apply to anybody.
I know that I tend to eschew humans or man-made objects in my photos, and that is related to what I find most beautiful in this world.
Anyway, to sum it up, a quote from the article:
That's my hypothesis: Beauty is nothing more than our recognition of functions that are related to current or past survival.
I also read that post on his blog, it's an interesting blog to follow! Not sure I agree particularly. He compares general 'taste' to the human taste in beauty of the opposite sex. Methinks that asthetics which determine taste in other things are more closely tied to the feeling of calm given rather than beauty.
I find the study of "beauty" most fascinating and have read many of the famous philosophers on aesthetics. One aspect that fascinates me is how the human perception of beauty is composed of both a "learned" or "environmental" element and a base or "instinctive" element.
An example of the learned element is how our perception of weight (skinny vs. fat) and skin tone (fair vs. tanned) has changed over the ages. Centuries ago fair and fat was considered more beautiful because they were equated with a rich or noble lifestyle that allowed people to avoid heavy labor under the hot sun. Witness the old paintings of the great masters.
Then, as the industrial revolution moved labor indoors, skinny and tan became perceived as more beautiful, since they were equated with a rich lifestyle that provided leisure time to exercise and sun bathe. Witness George Hamilton and Twiggy.
But being a techie at heart, I'm most fascinated by the instinctive element of our perception of beauty and attempts to describe it in quantitative terms. The most fascinating to me is the study of the "Golden Mean". If you don't know what that is, Google it and enjoy some enlightenment. Basically it's a ratio, roughly 1 to 1.62, derived from some math called the Fibonacci series.
The human animal perceives that things constructed close to the Golden Mean ratio are more beautiful than things that are not. And this is something that we can apply to our photography to make our images more appealing to the masses.
An excellent example if this is some work done by a plastic surgeon named Marquardt. He has constructed a mathematical model of the human face and created a "mask" than can be overlayed on a portrait. Faces that conform to the mask are ones we consider beautiful. Faces that significantly depart from the mask we consider ugly.
In 2001, the BBC produced a 4-hour documentary entitled "The Human Face", narrated by John Cleese. A segment of that documentary featured Marquardt and his beauty mask. In one experiment, a number of portrait photos were placed in a large empty room at floor level. Some were "beautiful" according to the mask, some were ugly. A group of babies was released into the room to crawl about. Inevitably, the babies crawled to and stared at the beautiful images, while shying away from the ugly images.
The Golden Mean applies to much more than the human face and body. In fact, it can be found all over the beauty of nature. From trees and plants to sea shells. In fact, the inner spiral of a conch shell is one of the most common examples of the Golden Mean.
