It abounds when and if we look for it

                                           Sunlight reflecting off sink fixtures

Whenever I hear “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder,” I take it to mean that some people find beauty where others do not. An artist friend who designs and sells jewelry once remarked that he made it a practice to experience beauty every day. I thought that was wonderful. But between work and family life, the only time I found available to search for beauty was when I was out with a camera looking for it.

Searching for opportunities to compose elements within a frame in ways that fed my aesthetic hunger, I frequented scrap yards, construction sites, abandoned buildings, tractor-trailer parks, empty fairgrounds, railroad graveyards and musty antique shops. As a consequence of creating order out of visual chaos, I was experiencing beauty in unconventional places and subjects. I first noticed this when I realized that I didn’t need to go to the beaches, national parks or anywhere else to find beautiful subject matter. It was at hand. To transform an ugly or ordinary object into a beautiful one, all I had to do was to decide to see it that way—with or without a camera. That said, beauty is a choice we make.

My curiosity about it has been an evolution. As a child, I thought certain people, places and things were intrinsically beautiful and others were not. Through readings and formal education I learned that beauty is subjective and it varies widely between individuals. Camerawork taught me that beauty can be manufactured, as when  lit or arranged objects in a more pleasing way. And that by deliberate choice, an ordinary object can be transformed into something beautiful. Actually, working for film and television companies, my job was to often to make everyday situations and products (sheets and pillow cases, jewelry, toys, food, car dealerships, corporate interiors—look beautiful.

As subjective experience, beauty (along with goodness and truth) evades description. Nonetheless, each of us can, with contemplation, find some words to better understand its place in our lives. Currently, the experience of beauty presents me with feelings of joy and harmony, sometimes awe. Especially it comes whenever I encounter nature’s design principles at work, even in man-made objects.

The above image reminds me that beauty can be found anywhere—literally in the kitchen sink. And I can predispose myself to experience it by choosing to see it in everyday places and objects. Beauty is not only something to be found, it’s something to be open to—or made. It may be in the “eye” of the beholder, but it’s also in the heart touched by an appreciation of all that is.  

It’s not what you look at that matters, it’s what you see.

Henry David Thoreau, American naturalist, essayist, poet, philosopher