MAPACA

Mid-Atlantic Popular &
American Culture Association

If photography spent its first hundred plus years trying to persuade the world that it was art, a significant area of it, namely documentary, seems to have spent the last thirty years or more trying to convince the world that it isn’t. If postmodernism threw objectivity to the wind, even post-postmodern theoretical efforts to salvage that same objectivity through redefinition leave one with a sense of nostalgic chasing after days gone by. Interestingly, the most meta context of these efforts includes a reinvigorated discussion connecting aesthetics and ethics while by times dizzily circling around the even more problematic concept of beauty.

This paper, though informed by such theoretical discourse, is grounded in the practical place of beauty in postmodern photographic imagery and, as will be argued, its potential power therein. It acknowledges the particularly poignant discussion set loose in documentary when the denial of objectivity fed the potential charge of aestheticism (be it a Salgado famine or a Meyerowicz Ground Zero image) finding voices in the likes of Benjamin, Sontag, and Beautiful Suffering, the splendid volume that grew out of a 2006 exhibition of like name. Perhaps, as has been argued, beauty’s reappearance is but a nostalgic attempt to order our disorderly postmodern world.

This paper, however, drawing on a range of materials from Andres Serrano’s imagery to David Shields’ War is Beautiful, will argue that the meeting point of camera lens and surface beauty—perhaps because of a seeming simplicity— is singularly positioned to stir us to question beauty’s ideological potential, its capitalist value (think of Dave Hickey), indeed its very desirability. The insights gained thereby into ourselves, our principles, and our engagement with images, moreover, may prove far more significant than the subject of the images themselves.