The One Skill That Actually Makes Photography Beautiful (It's Not Composition) - Moments of Mood, 3.6

If you want to make photographs that actually mean something, work that feels unmistakably yours, you've probably asked yourself the same question I have before.
How do my pictures of beautiful things still feel empty while someone else can photograph a cardboard box in plain sunlight and it stops me cold?
I want to show you what beauty in photography actually is, why it was never about what is in front of your lens, and the one skill to double down on now your attention so that your work starts carrying your voice instead of just your subjects.
A few weeks ago, I sat down with Tim Carpenter on the podcast, and somewhere around the hour mark, I asked him what beauty in a photograph actually means to him.
So the one I will go back to, and you know, it's in the it's in the first book, but it's gonna be in the second one too.
I agree with Robert Adams said that you know, he pretty much equated beauty with form.
Uh with what a lot of people call significant form.
And I what I think is that, and this is gonna be all in the second book.
I've been talking about you know, us creatures and what the what a phenomenologist would say, both the philosophers and the neuroscientists, by the way, would say that this this creature is in an almost constant state of imbalance, and it's always looking to make it to balance it to get a better grip on its inputs.
You know, um we're we're we're in a constant state of frustration.
And when when our disequilibrium becomes a little bit of equilibrium, the body relaxes for a moment.
That's fleeting and it's furtive, but the body says, I gotta control on this, I got a hand on this, you know.
Like also, this is why we like being in our homes and stuff, is because uh, you know, all of those uh inputs are calmed, you know, and that's why we can feel calm and that we can't out in the world because of all you know the the diversity and the the the speed of all the inputs.
But but okay, so what I'm going towards is that like this creature needs form.
It needs for for some things occasionally to make some sense and say, all right, I got a grip on this, things are good for the for my survival.
What I really want to work on in this in this next book, and um I'll give it away now, uh, is that I think that form in any artwork is a model for that form that brings us a bit of equilibrium.
And that's why I think we have a bodily response and a non-linguistic response to form.
All right.
That's that's how this all kind of comes back around together.
Um you know, like we it uh uh when we see equilibrium in a in a picture, in a poem, in a painting.
All right, I understand in that made thing what I'm always trying to do.
And we would never articulate this, you know, like and here's the twister is that the photograph is the thing that's most attached, most tethered to the actual world.
So it's I for me, I think it's the most it's it just does does that job the best because those are actual things, you know.
Like uh even though we you know we can love a painting or love a poem, but we know that we're living in an imaginary world.
And it with the photograph, it's different.
You know, like it's it's we know we're we're familiar with we we live in that same world, and and somehow this person, she found a purchase on the world for a moment that makes sense to me.
Um so that's where I really, you know, like I think that I think the form is and that's why it's be we call it beauty, because you know, like uh a beauty is a relief.
Um, you know, it it's a wholeness, it's a completeness.
His answer has been with me since, and I've been thinking about it because he didn't talk about light or subjects or style.
He talked about chaos and about fear, about why a creature like us needs form the way it needs shelter.
I have one of my own pictures with me here on the screen.
Nobody would call this subject beautiful.
No one would probably travel for it.
And by the end of this episode, I want you to see why it might be the most honest kind of photograph I make, and why the beauty you have been going out to find has been weighty in how you look, not in what you actually look at.
This is the Moo Podcast.
I'm Matt Jacob, and this is the show that helps emerging photographers find their voice so that you can build a cohesive body of work, articulate what that work is about, and get it in front of the right people.
It's the only photography podcast that is itself a practice because every week I sit down with a guest or break down a single idea in a commentary like this one called Moments of Mood.
Either way, we slow down and turn one idea over in the hand until it shows us something about how we see and who we are becoming as artists.
Now, two questions sit underneath everything today.
The first, is beauty a property of things, something out there to be found, or is it something made by the quality of attention that you bring?
And the second question, and the one that touches your voice directly, if beauty is made and not found, then what does your eye keep making without you necessarily asking it to?
And what would happen if you started paying attention more to that?
Before we go on, though, sit with me for half a minute.
Lift your eyes from this screen and find the most ordinary thing near you right now.
It could be a carp or a doorframe or the fold of a curtain.
Now look at it the way you would look at something that actually mattered.
Focus and give it the attention you would give a face that you love.
And notice what happens.
The thing hasn't changed, but something has started to gather around it.
The kind of weight, kind of order and the details.
And hold on to your attention right there because that small act is the entire subject of today, and we're going to come back to it.
So let me take you back into that conversation I had with Tim, because as I said, I asked him what beauty means to him in a photograph.
And when answering, uh, he referenced Robert Adams as expected, and his book, Beauty in Photography.
His words on the show were that he agrees with Adams, who, as Tim put it, pretty much equated beauty with form, and that's pretty much what that book is about.
What a lot of people call significant form, that is.
Not beauty as prettiness, not beauty as subject matter, beauty as structure, as the way a picture holds together with all of its elements.
And then he explained why that actually matters.
He said that we're creatures in an almost constant state of imbalance, always trying to get a better grip on the flood of the world coming at us now more than ever.
We live, in his words, in a constant state of frustration.
And when, for a moment, that disequilibrium becomes a little bit of equilibrium, the body relaxes and the body says, I have a hold on this.
And then he said that beauty is a relief, it is a wholeness, a completeness.
And he quoted the poet Wallace Stevens, who called it a sudden rightness.
But I don't know, that phrase only means something once you know what form actually is, right?
And it is not what most people think, I don't think.
When most photographers hear this word form, they might just think of composition rules or shapes or some art school abstraction or theory.
Tim means something a little bit more radical, I think, and he was precise about this on the episode.
Form, he said, is the structure of the picture.
That form is how one places one body in relation to the world and the subject matter, of course.
Are you getting in really tight?
Or are you maintaining a distance?
Are you leaving dead space in foregrounds like Tim said he used to do?
It is the edges of the picture, the footing, where you have a purchase on the world.
It is the aperture you chose, the focal length, the speed, the tones of the print, so much.
And he calls these machine things, formal choices.
Every one of them is part of form.
Put it as plainly as I can: form is everything in the photograph except the subject, the position you stood in, or the angle you chose, or the distance you kept, the moment that you pressed, why that moment?
All these decisions you made, and the decisions you did not know where they were coming from or why you were making them.
Form is the photographer pressed invisibly into the frame.
Now, Tim gave an example as well that I think kind of nails it.
Photograph a national flag or a Christian cross or a handgun, even, and everything you would say about those pictures, the politics, the meanings, the associations, all of it lives in your mind, not in the picture.
Concepts only live in brains, but the form, the distance, the light, the structure, the held order of the thing, that is absolutely in the picture as well.
And then he explained why form is what actually moves us as human beings.
For anything to really hit, he said, the form has to hit first.
The beauty of the picture has to come to you first.
And then only then can the message land.
Going back to my ordinary picture that I have on the screen, with that definition in your ear now, the subject is nothing, but everything else in it, the distance, the weight, the way the frame holds, that's all me.
That is the part that cannot at all be removed from the picture, because it is the picture.
Now hold that against the way almost all of us were taught to think about beauty.
Because the general consensus runs the other way entirely.
Beauty, we are told and shown, is subject matter.
It is the beautiful golden hour and the dramatic coastline.
It is the photogenic face, the exotic location, the striking thing.
The entire visual economy we scroll through every day is built on this.
Find a more beautiful subject, and you will have a more beautiful photograph.
So we save for the trip, we chase the light, we envy the photographers who live somewhere better.
And our own street, our own minds, our own rooms, our own ordinary lives start to feel like a disqualification.
Now, Tim made the same mistake as I have, as all of us have, and he admitted it on the show with a confession I loved him for.
Early on, deep in his road trip period, he would come back from a shoot with hundred roles of film and find himself thinking, I hope that old motel sign worked out.
I hope that interesting looking guy turned out as I pictured it.
In his own words, I was so subject matter driven because I was thinking about those photographers that I loved in the wrong way.
I was just looking at what they had photographed and not how they were structuring that whole thing.
It took a project along a vanished rail line near his hometown in central Illinois, a place with nothing to find, no signs, no characters, just trees and water and roads to force him to stop hunting subjects and start making structure.
The place gave him not that much, so everything in the pictures had to come from him.
That is the turn.
And most photographers never make it because the consensus keeps whispering.
It keeps whispering that the problem is their subjects, when the invitation the whole time was just their attention.
On the episode with Tim, I did read a few passages out loud from his book To Photograph is to learn how to die, where he quotes Robert Adams, asking the question directly: why is form beautiful?
And Adams answers, because I think it helps us meet our worst fear, the suspicion that life may be chaos and that therefore our suffering is without meaning.
Sit with how serious and deep that is.
Adams is saying that when you stand in front of the mess of the world and find the one position from which it coheres, you are not decorating anything, right?
You are answering in the only language the body fully trusts, the oldest fear we have, the fear that none of it hangs together.
A beautiful photograph is just a small standing proof that the world can cohere.
That for one moment from one position, held by one person paying attention, it did.
Now, Adams went further, of course, and you can read his book, but he said that form in a picture is justified by experience of wholeness, coherence in life.
And if art is to convincingly remind us of that experience, the shape in art has to be believably tentative, as fragile as meaning seems to be in life.
Which is why the most moving photographs, I think, are never the airtight, over-perfected ones.
They hold, but barely, like meaning does.
One thing here in the middle of my rant, and then I will get it out of the way, but attention is a practice, and practices deepen fastest in company.
I've built that company in the mood insiders.
It's a room where the scoreboard is off, where nobody asks how a picture performed, and where in our critiques and our book club sessions, we look at work exactly the way Tim looks at it or Robert Adams looks at it, going into the edges, the depths, the form, the way a body met the world long before anyone reaches for what it is actually about.
So if you want to train your attention among people doing the same slow introspective work, that room is there.
Now, back to the conversation, because there is one more thing that Tim said that completes the definition of form and is the idea the whole episode was named for.
He said that if he were six inches taller or six inches shorter, every single one of his pictures would be different.
The camera is attached to our body, right?
And the body cannot lie.
If you're happy, your shoulders open.
If things are not so great, you close in a little bit and you move differently.
And the machine is responsive to every bit of that.
You cannot fool yourself out of it, he said.
So you cannot fool a dumb machine out of it either.
Which means form is not only a set of choices you make.
It's more a record of how you specifically meet the world, including the parts you have never consciously chosen.
So when I look at this picture now, I can read myself in it, the distance I kept, where I placed my feet, my hands, what I could not help including.
Tim said that when someone sits in front of him with 50 pictures, such as in a review, he's watching how another human being moves his or her body against the world, and that every person is, in his words, a fresh miracle.
How lovely.
And your contact sheet is that, your Lightroom catalogue is that.
Not an attempt at beauty, but a record of a particular creature finding a particular order.
But here's the catch.
And it's the reason I keep returning to attention and mindfulness.
The body writes your form, whether you are thinking or watching it or not.
The question is whether you can read what it wrote for you.
And that's a skill and a trainable one.
And its name is awareness or mindfulness.
Now, remember what happened in the still point at the start of this conversation.
You gave an ordinary object the attention you would give a face that you love, and something gathered around it.
Nothing in the object changed, of course.
Your attention changed, and order started to begin.
And that is the practice in miniature form.
Mindfulness is not incense and silence, not for us.
For a photographer, it is the capacity to notice, to notice what you are drawn to before you can justify it, to notice the distance your body wants to keep today and to wonder why, to investigate that, to be curious, to notice in Tim's phrasing what you have been making, because he says exactly this to his students that at some point you have to yank yourself out of the flow, put the screws to it, and ask, what have I been making here and why?
And he told a story during our conversation about doing it to himself, editing his first book.
He noticed an unusual amount of dead foreground space in his images, a gap between himself and everything else.
And his next thought was what is that saying about me?
Am I a distant person right now?
And he said that actually that was the case.
His form knew his inner life before he did.
That is what awareness buys you.
The body decides the photograph before you do.
But attention is how you finally get to read the decision.
And reading it is how a scattered set of pictures becomes a cohesive one and a voice that you can name.
This is why I sit every morning before I touch a camera or a screen or do anything, not to necessarily relax, but to sharpen the one instrument every photograph I make is made with my mind and my attention.
Okay, so let's bring all of this together and let's land it.
Because the genuinely consoling part is if beauty is form and form is made by attention, then nothing in your life is beneath the camera.
You do not need that trip you can't afford, or the location, or the spectacular face.
Take Robert Adams, who made his life's work from suburbs and tracked houses that his contemporaries thought was beneath photographing.
Now, Tim makes his from trees and roads in central Illinois.
The whole argument of their work is that coherence can be made anywhere by anyone willing to attend.
And every time you make it, you are doing the old serious human thing.
You are answering chaos with a small held order.
You are reminding yourself and anyone who later stands in front of the picture that the world can still come right suddenly, just for a moment, from where you stood.
That is what beauty is for.
That's what it is, and it always was.
So let me gather this into a few things that you can carry out starting today.
The first thing is to understand beauty is not found, it is made.
It is form the held order of the picture, and the instrument that makes it is your attention.
So start paying attention, be mindful, and most importantly, practice it.
Number two, form answers fear.
Every coherent frame is a small proof against the suspicion that life is chaos, and it moves us most when it is tentative, as fragile as meaning is in life.
Number three, your form is your voice, often without you even knowing it.
The mind, and by extension, your body, decides the photograph before you do, and the order your eye keeps making without being asked is the most honest signature you have.
So stop trying to find it elsewhere and start noticing what it already does.
So take your camera to the most ordinary place in your life, maybe.
The street you no longer see, the room you stopped looking at years ago, the town you're too familiar with, and make one photograph in which the form holds, not a beautiful subject, a held frame.
Then look at it and just ask one question.
What kind of order did I just make?
And what does it say about how I meet the world?
I get that's two questions really.
But do that honestly, even once, and you will have done two things at the same time.
You would have made something beautiful out of nothing anyone else would have maybe overlooked, and you will have heard quietly, in the structure of your own picture, the sound of that voice of yours.
So now you can see that maybe beauty was never out there in the subjects, but it was made by your attention.
And your form is your voice just waiting to be read.
But how do you actually develop that awareness, that self-knowledge that lets you read your voice and see your own patterns before they pass?
Well, check out this next video where we dive into the hidden psychology behind your photography and talk about the benefits of mindfulness when it comes to practicing the craft of photography itself.
I'll see you there.
Happy shooting.