Aesthetic Appreciation of the Beauty in Human Body through Photography

There are different subject fields which expanded in the mid of 18^th century. When we talk about art and aesthetics, art comes first chronologically. The very word ‘aesthetics’ comes into academic discourse for the first time by Alexander Baumgartner. He coined the term aesthetics and Kant baptized the subject in the Critique of Aesthetic Judgment. Today art is a massive subject. Here I am also going to analyze some kind of aesthetic appreciation in the art world. However, there were 02 types of arts as liberal arts and fine arts. In fine arts, there were 07 arts naming; sculpture, painting, architecture, music, dancing, drama and theatre and poetry. These identifications have a long history in both East and West. In 18^th and 19^th centuries, the mode of production changed from feudal into industrial society. Great aesthetic episodes in the man time happened in this industrial revolution. The nature and scope of arts too changed and new subjects arrived and sophisticated (the nature of liberal arts got changed). After 1890s, science dominated each and every field. Therefore 03 fields were added to arts with the influence of science. They are cinema, fashion designing and photography. Here my main aim is to look at how photography contributes to manifest its aesthetic appreciation on human body. Before going to discuss this aspect, I will introduce what is beauty, the interpretations on human body and photography respectively.

The importance of art and beauty is hardly open to debate. Whether we consider the individual or the group, ancient or modern times, we cannot afford to neglect the aesthetic aspect of life. The men of the old stone-aged drew pictures on the walls of cave. Since tradition reaches, people have sung and danced. The first woman to be praised for her beauty was recorded in history. Life without beauty would be far duller than it is. Moreover, art and beauty offer a challenge to our curiosity like the origin of species. Therefore, Beauty is one of the significant subjects in art and later in aesthetics. Therefore this has been a question or discussion since the first work of art produced in both East and West. Pinning down a definition for beauty is not an easy task. It is indefinable at all. Sometimes, beauty is subjective and sometimes beauty is objective and at the same time, beauty is both objective and subjective. What is important is not the cobweb, spider is important since it is the subject and therefore subject is important to create beauty. However, taste of beauty is always changing from one person to another and even within one individual. Beauty has been defined in various standpoints. We want mediation to have the sense of beauty; for example, paintings, and sculpture and human creations. As well as we do not have to have the mediation to have the sense of beauty for instance landscape, sun and other natural components.

Furthermore, many scholars have discussed about human body and its artistic beauty during ancient times to contemporary. However human body was interpreted in a biological sense previously. Among the biological interpretations, some intellectuals observe the notion of beauty in human body philosophically and in artistic sense. The emergence in recent years of postmodern and feminist thinking demands a reconsideration of how the body is represented in the visual arts. No longer is body a simple object of visual delight and erotic pleasure, the body now understood to be the site of a highly charged debate. New theories insist that the representation of the body in the visual arts is central to society’s construction not only of norms of sexual behavior but of power relationships in general. Nevertheless, our 21^st century view of the human body is not only the relation between the individual and society, but also the relation between humanity and the world. While considering both the concept of beauty and human body, I am going to explain how it relates with photographic expressions. Before going to discuss this issue descriptively, let me introduce what is photography as an art.

Photography is one of the best art forms man invented. There are different aspects of photography which people interrogated. In an artistic sense, the aesthetics of photography can be interpreted subjectively while determining what component of a photograph makes it beautiful to the viewer. However, there are many ongoing discussions about different facets of photography.

Here I am going to examine how the human body has been represented by photography throughout the history of this most modern of all media in the visual arts. Photography has been the most widespread means of visual communication of the past century and a half, and has done more than any other medium to shape our notions of the body in modern times. Photography and Modernism grew up together; as an industrial product, photography stands as a metonym for the industrialization that defines the modern era. Photography is also a metonym for the Enlightenment, the philosophical thinking that arose in the eighteenth century and that has dominated the Modern era. The Enlightenment valued empiricism, the belief that experience, especially of the senses, is the only source of knowledge. Here photography plays an empirical role in the modern society.

Since the late 1980s, an extraordinary number of photographic practices and critical texts have taken the human body as their central subject. Reflecting the perceptions of gender and ageing (Jo Spence, Cindy Sherman, Annette Messager), critical ideas on racial difference (Adrian Piper, Mona Hatoum) and other societal issues have been discussed by the photographers and they not only concentrate on how to represent bodies or what kinds of bodies should be represented, but also with the emergence of specifically photographic ways of seeing the body and with the role of photography in the production of desire. In the 1990s, photography historians and theorists suggested that the new interest in the body in photography was linked to the critical theories and ‘body politics’.  The fascination with the body has also linked to the advent of new technologies and technical knowledge and new means of rapidly reproducing and disturbing photographic images. So the beauty of the body has interpreted in different perspectives. They captured human body in different angles. Sport men and women, children, breast feeding mothers and elders as their artistic taste of beauty through photography. Furthermore, photographers provide various definitions for their captures and interpret in to the societal issues and exhibit into the outer world.

In contrary to Aristotle’s notion that beauty lies within order and symmetrical and balanced (honey comb, cobweb). But a night with full of stars is beautiful though it is not arranged orderly. And For example, if we take a walk inside a wild forest we cannot see any flat surfaces or smooth surfaces. There is an infinite variety of textures, curves, shapes, forms, which is visually enriching and pleasing to the human eye. It is therefore true beauty is not 100% symmetrical, is not totally smooth, and youth is not always the most beautiful thing. The most beautiful trees are twisted and growing in all these asymmetric patterns. Also of course, the older a tree is, the more we praise it. An older tree is a beautiful tree. We can apply the same philosophy to human being and their body. The older the human, with more wrinkles, crevices and texture in their skin, is better and more beautiful. That is why photographers focus on the snapshots of old aged people nowadays.

The bad trend we can see in photography is that everyone try to make their photos perfectly symmetrical. However, according to my view, I think asymmetric compositions are far more elegant, interesting, dynamic, and epic than static, symmetrical compositions. When we consider about the body of sport men and women, we can relate this clearly. They move and not stable while playing, but it is an artistic capture to take a minute to look at the photograph. Although beauty is both subjective and objective concept, and how people look at the human body through photography are also both subjective and objective. So it is very difficult to come to a definite conclusion. Therefore, from the above issues I have discussed here are to show how people in different period of time interpret their own ideas regarding the beauty of the body and my main focus was to manifest how photography contributes to prove this evidence. I limited my argument only to the western context. This aspect is totally different in the Eastern context. As in conclusion, it is crystal clear that photography has the capacity to manifest an aesthetic appreciation for the beauty in the human body descriptively.

Article by – Sewwandi Samadara