Beauty as a Tactic

One of my very first posts here and a whole slew of those I've written since then address one or another topic at the intersection of beauty and politics in photography. As I've made pretty clear, I find most discussion of this topic irritatingly simple-minded. That said, I came across this post, entitled "Beauty as a Tactic," by Canadian photographer Tony Fouhse at Slightly Lucid*. Not only do I generally agree with Fouhse that we need to think about the uses of beauty and the consequences of using it. But I am intrigued too by the parenthetical aside in this comment:

"James Nachtwey and Simon Norfolk take their cameras to war, not exclusively, but a lot. Both have an "eye" (though I prefer the word "brain") that can, and usually does, turn the horror they witness into beautiful photographs."

I think too much writing about photography wallows in overly romantic musings about intuition and sentiment and simple luck (although the latter is probably the most important of the three). Seeing is a cognitive activity and that means "brains" are going to be pretty important. It is no coincidence that Nachtwey and Norfolk appear pretty regularly in my posts. They are really smart photographers.
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* Slightly Lucid, by the way, is the very insightful blog of the apparently also very smart Montreal-based photographer Aislinn Leggett.