MoPA
Seeing Beauty, located at the Museum of Photographic Arts in Balboa Park, is an exhibition in which the viewers discover the beauty of photography through the eyes of various photographers, including Bill Brandt, Walker Evans, Mary Ellen Mark, Edward Weston, Minor White, and Aaron Siskind. The gorgeous pictures people expect to see consist of the many genres of photography, like portraiture, abstraction, landscape, and still life. When I was in Fine Arts in high school, I became aware of these concepts and knew how significant they can be in society. Since my panorama of the view outside my house wowed everyone in the classroom, I knew it was a good idea for me to submit it to the Arts Contest, in which three winners would be awarded 100 dollars. The photographs in the exhibition really do feature elements in the context of aesthetic beauty, and they remind me about the fact that my experience of looking at art can be affected by the question of how our personal interpretation and notions of what constitutes beauty. Nigel Poor’s pictures of flies suggest that beauty of a creature can become obsolete as time goes by. One picture, Lima 89 (taken by Aaron Siskind in 1975), is one of an L painted on a wall and an homage to Franz Kline, a painter known for abstract expressionist paintings that appear in black and white. Another picture, which features Courtney Chavis and Georgiannia Oswald (taken by Mary Ellen Mark in Lexington, South Carolina, 1995) and appears in black and white, suggests beauty can exist at an age before 10. I should know that because I have a sister who competed and won in several beauty pageants when she was in Elementary school. I also noticed there were pictures of 7-year-old girls practicing for a beauty pageant taken by Susan Rankaitis, reminding me of those days when my sister was in the pageants. With my photographic eye and Photoshop skills, I’m bound to make objects look old and new depending on their appearance.
