What is beauty? A Google search offers pages upon pages of results seeking to answer just that. But beauty is in the eye of the beholder, right?
Defining Beauty
Before I took a break from social media (more on that soon), a trend gaining momentum was body positivity and acceptance. Instagram accounts from Jameela Jamil (and her equally crucial i_weigh account) or Danae Mercer actively fight against the overly photoshopped images posted by influencers and many magazines. Slowly the unrealistic–and often unhealthy–beauty standards are being shattered.
What about beauty standards in art? American poet Edna St. Vincent Millay said, “beauty is whatever gives joy.” Sure, some things are nearly universally accepted as beautiful: New England’s fall foliage, an ocean sunset, the Grand Canyon. But can beauty be found elsewhere? According to cinematographer Conrad Hall, “there is a kind of beauty in imperfection.” I like his thinking.
Beauty to Me
In 5th grade, I had an art assignment to draw something we found beautiful. Our teacher brought us outside on a lovely spring day and let the class spread out around the school. We had plenty to choose from: flowers, trees, the American flag, clouds, the building. Everyone chose their objects and started their drawings. But for me, none of those traditionally beautiful items spoke to me. Yes, they were beautiful, but they were also overdone. So I found my inspiration elsewhere–the dumpster. (Could this be why I had a hard time making friends?)
Part of me felt bad for the dumpster; I was certain no one had drawn it in the past. But I also did find it beautiful in a way: the clean lines, the shade of blue accented by patches of rust, the essential service it provided. Maybe no one else thought of the dumpster as beautiful, and perhaps no one else ever would, but I did. The art teacher sang my praises to my parents at the next open house for thinking outside the box, but I didn’t feel I had done anything extraordinary.
I always found the non-traditional beautiful. In second grade, a classmate came in one day wearing glasses. I was jealous. I loved the way glasses looked on people, and I had always wanted glasses myself. Of course, even today, my eyesight is perfect (it’s my hearing that is horrible). When touring colleges, I scoffed at some of the schools with stunning campuses, even declaring one unfit because “all the trees looked the same.” Instead, the campus I loved was in the city, where we passed a homeless guy sleeping on a bench at the campus train station.
What is Beauty to Others
Unfortunately, my love of untraditional beauty made traditional art classes difficult. Some teachers appreciated my unique take on things, while most were unbending in their pursuit of conventional beauty. The final art class I took during my academic years was a photography class, a medium I had grown very comfortable with during high school and was eager to expand my knowledge. But the teacher was the worst of the worst when it came to defining beauty. If the assignment didn’t come back exactly how he wanted, he’d rip you to shreds. It didn’t matter if the exposure and editing were perfect: if the boundaries were pushed on the content in the photo, he did not like it.
His class discouraged me so much that I put my camera down for years. And when I did pick it back up, I no longer felt comfortable pushing the boundaries. Picture after picture of just-bloomed flowers, flowing rivers, vibrant skies–all traditionally beautiful. And all overdone. Every photograph that I took just felt ‘eh’. Maybe I was too critical of myself; maybe I wasn’t doing what felt natural. Traditional beauty in art was never my thing, so why fight it.
Over recent years I’ve been picking up my camera more frequently. A couple of Christmases ago, my husband bought me an upgraded version of my fifteen-year-old digital camera, which helped further reignite the spark. But this time, I’m doing things my way. I’m giving the dumpsters of the world their time to shine. Well, maybe not actual dumpsters, but the items deemed not beautiful by traditional standards. Finally, the rusted, broken, and forgotten will have their time in the spotlight.
Introducing Lenny Bird
My first installment in this photographic journey is of Lenny Bird. Now, Lenny and I go back twelve years when it was love at first sight. His goofy eyes and unusually long neck and legs made me smile. He has been by my side ever since. Even though he’s starting to show his age, the sight of Lenny still makes me smile. So just who–or what–is Lenny? He’s a lawn ornament. Some googly-eyed, outrageous lawn ornament. And I love him.
The evening I photographed Lenny, I actually started with a different subject: reflections of trees in an oversized puddle. But I wasn’t inspired. I stuck Lenny in the picture to add variety but quickly realized he was the star. With such an understanding subject, I experimented with different settings and exposures; two hundred photographs later, I felt confident I had something that captured his essence.
Lenny will not be the next Mona Lisa, nor do I think he would want that. He seems content living the life of a lawn ornament, collecting dirt and rust along the way. But Lenny is my first stepping stone towards finding beauty where it is least expected. Over the course of that evening, idea after idea kept coming to me. What I thought was a fun project to practice using my camera ended up being so much more.
What is Beauty to Me
Since that night, I’ve been keenly aware of anything that isn’t considered traditionally beautiful. And there is a lot. I’m having a hard time sitting down and selecting photos of Lenny to share on this website because my mind is racing on to the next idea. But Lenny is too cute to keep to myself, so I will have his photographs up in the near future.
In 5th grade, I didn’t know who philosopher David Hume was. I probably couldn’t even explain what a philosopher was then. But my drawing of the dumpster fit with his philosophy: “Beauty in things exists in the mind which contemplates them.” How would mundane activities and dreary days feel if you could still find something beautiful? I know how it makes me feel; why don’t you give it a shot.