Perhaps ugliness is a young person's game?
https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2019/07/08/whats-the-use-of-beauty/
It was never my game. Whatever ugliness I produced came from personal lack of abilitiy to render unto beauty what she deserved; I didn't always know how.
Beauty does have a common denominator - and it changes with the times. A Mansfield, today, is ludicrous unless you are into private websites (I assume). The natural beauty of Shrimpton, again for me, outshines all of the Photoshopped Evangelistas and Stones. The perfection of the unreal is at once its removal from humanity and any sense of beauty: it becomes artwork and/or caricature. So, yes, I believe that if you lose the sense of vulnerability, of the all too transitory sense of the nature of youth that shines on the surface above, and clothes the bones, then you could just as well be looking at painted marble or, even, ebony. Paradoxically, some old beauties manage to retain the face. Deneuve is one who springs to mind. Fatter, the face still has it, Bardot lost it - or threw it away - years and years ago, sadly. Those same cloaked bones of youth still suppport the canvas, the condition of which depends, really quite a lot, on the care given to it through life. Perhaps that is an area where wealth comes into its own: preservation.
Ugliness is far more common than beauty, but not as common as bland normality. That's perhaps one of the greatest challenges the non-wealthy amateur faces with photography of people if he wants to depict beauty. Where the hell can he find it? Yeah, the streets; really? Now and then I do see somebody amazing but there is no way I can make use of that. The last such occasion I remember was months ago when my daughter was here on holiday and, stopped at a street corner to let cars pass, I saw this vision sitting in the passenger seat. I was powerless to snap; and if I had been prepared, what then? A stolen image and no chance of working with the person to achieve something that might have been better?
Beauty may or may not have definitions, but unlike much of art, I do believe there is a broader consensus of "knowing it when we see it."
Rob
