When Jason first launched his photography business and chose his tagline “Finding Beauty in Everything”, I thought it was a great reflection of his enthusiasm for seeing subjects and making photographs. I also paused, though. I paused to think about whether I am open-minded enough myself to decide there is beauty to be found in everything.

For landscape and abstract photography, there is certainly a broader range of subjects that viewers might find beautiful. An image of an antiquated, abandoned barn standing alone in a rural field and against a deep blue sky might be considered as beautiful as an image of a mountain range reflected in a flat calm glacial lake. Age and antiquity are not  barriers, and are even sought.

I also do a lot of portrait photography, though, and in my work I am constantly reminded of how our culture’s definition of beauty is indeed very narrow. Many of my portrait subjects are young children, and people often comment how often that must be “tough”. In one way, though, I find it some of the easiest portrait work to do. It comes down to the fact that most people easily find joy and beauty in viewing the innocence of kids in portraits, and the kids themselves are not self conscious about how they look in a photo.

This is not at all the case when photographing adults. Just like with kids, lighting and composition and the technical side of photography are important. However, there is often an additional difficult element that requires skill and experience to approach: By and large, the older we get the less we like to be photographed. That goes for yours truly, too. One of the most important skills for a portrait photographer is the ability to connect with the person in front of the lens, and as much as possible make him or her forget that he or she really does not enjoy being photographed.

So what is it with us adults in front of the camera? It’s really not that difficult to figure out. Most of us wish we were younger, thinner, less gray around the temples, more muscular, more shapely, etc. etc. etc. There is no doubt these wishes have cultural drivers. True story: My wife – who is by no means unattractive – was looking over my shoulder as I was preparing a portrait I took of her for printing. She rarely lets me photograph her because she never feels “made up” enough. She said, “It looks sort of blurry. Why is that?” What she was seeing was not blur, but some softening I often apply to portraits to ease the out-of-the-camera sharpness which tends to exaggerate wrinkles and imperfections in skin. I explained this, and showed her how the photograph looked exactly as it came out the camera. It took her less than a second to say she liked the “softer” one better. Suddenly, her description of the portrait changed from “blurry” to “softer”.

The pre-print editing I did on that portrait certainly is nothing close to the “Photoshopping” done for fashion magazines. Still, my wife undoubtedly liked the softened portrait because her skin looked more that like that of a model – a model who has makeup professionally applied and her photograph air-brushed. So why do I do this at all in my portrait work? Is it to make my subjects more appealing to my own eye? Actually, the answer is no. It is to make my subjects as pleased and comfortable as possible with how they feel they appear in the portrait.

 Undoubtedly, the mass media has a huge impact on our self-image, and especially so in the case of the female sex. So to answer Jason’s question of who decides what is beautiful: It is our mass media, and it goes way beyond just what we consider to be the ideal female form and face. It extends to the perfect home, the perfect car, the perfect lawn and garden, and to just about everything in our lives by which we think others are measuring our worth as people. However, the media is making those decisions because we allow them to do so.

It does not have to be that way. We can start deciding for ourselves what is beautiful, and making our definition much broader than what the mass media is choosing. One of the fascinating and even magical things about the camera is it does not see things the same way our eyes do. Because of that, photography and spending time looking through the lens can be an avenue to seeing the world in a new way, and finding beauty where you never noticed it exists.  Just see for yourself.

As Dorothea Lange put it:

“The camera is an instrument that teaches people how to see without a camera. . . “