Beauty and the Eye of the Beholder

As a child I took bad photos. I still take bad photos, but as a child they were bad in a specific way.

I was maybe early teens - I had a Russian camera which I loaded with black and white film (because processing black and white film was cheaper) and I would snap away, then wait days for processing. They would come back with stickers on, telling me that they were various kinds of poor.

I would take photos that might have been titled ‘distant bird in the sky’, ‘unremarkable horse in a field’, ‘some trees’, ‘cars at night’ and so on.

I think I know why I took them.

When she was six, my mum and I took my daughter to stay in a caravan on the south coast. She had a great time. At the end of the trip she wandered round the caravan taking pictures with her iPad. Can you guess what the pictures were pictures of? The carpet. A chair. A cushion. They were bad like my pictures.

There is a purity of purpose to these kind of pictures: we take them because we feel strongly about what we are seeing at the time of taking, and because we want to capture that feeling. They are not really for other people at all.

As adults we sometimes make this mistake - probably you do: holiday snaps that you subject other people to, or family events - dimly aware that your hapless captive is feigning interest, in recognition of the fact that they are clearly delightful to you.

As we grow older we gain a sense of aesthetics - pictures, sculpture or architecture which by their very nature can elicit an emotion in the average viewer, through some poorly understood process of composition or artistry. But even here we can’t be sure: the Mona Lisa leaves many people cold. But notice the difference between pictures which represent what we feel on the inside, and pictures which bring a feeling from the outside. The first type are usually more powerful and personal, but the second type are art.

It seems that many things are this way for us: we can craft an experience which affects the majority of people - a rock concert for example. But the things that have really moved you, personally, are not so easily shared. They are like holiday snaps. Often we see this phenomenon in learning: we ask an expert to talk about something and they say ‘safety is important’ or ‘diversity matters’, but this is like holding up a picture of a table. It is not until they tell the story behind the picture that we begin to understand.

Learning transfer is tough because learning doesn’t happen by sharing information, any more than holidays happen by holding up pictures of sandy beaches.

Our world is this way. We go through life attaching our reactions - our subtle sentiments - to our experiences, and finding weak ways to reflect these sentiments back into the world.