It is a beautiful day fall today. The sun is out, the trees are turning, the wind is buoyant and warm. On the way to the photocopy shop, I had this urge to devote the rest of the daylight hours to photography. I had a hunger for beauty in all its forms. And it came to me that this urge to create, to find, or to identify beauty, this need to envision beauty within the confines of my world, is a drive that originates with my youth. This hunger arose as an antidote to the beatings and ostracism I suffered at the hands of my peer group. The beatings ended long ago but the hunger for beauty has remained consistent for the last 50 years.

I now recognize I have developed a triad of psychological defences in response to an unpleasant childhood, three different coping mechanisms which form fundamental anchors to my behaviour patterns:

• A high degree of dedication and effort to gain peer group acceptance
• Resort to intellectual analysis to understand my situation and the motives of my tormentors
• A strong impulse to create, or to photograph, or to locate, beauty within my environment as an antidote to pain

Beauty is of course an abstract, a concept. It exists nowhere but in the mind of the appreciative observer. It is not a universal, but is shaped by cultural and social phenomena. There exists within any society a set of mechanisms by which the prevailing notion of beauty may be identified, validated, and promulgated. In a multicultural society such as our own there may exist many competing notions of beauty.

And it is clear that “beauty” has a temporal aspect. What is considered to be beautiful at one period in time, is likely to later fall out of favour and be discarded as gauche, derivative, or as the sterile product of the academy with little to no popular support. At the same time, the notion of beauty held by the majority of society is often derided as being utterly conventional and lacking any redeeming value. It is therefore labelled as kitsch.

Within any group of images there will be a set which fail to meet the prevailing aesthetic standard, conventional or not, but which may still be of significant interest to the public. The degree of public interest may be constrained by geographic criteria. I suspect the image contained in the header to this post may interest persons living within a 5 km radius of the image location. It is likely to hold little, or no, compelling interest to persons located outside of that geographic boundary.

Another thought strikes. I began with an observation in regard to my own behaviour. I have drawn on that insight to develop self awareness and have also commenced development of an aesthetic theory derived from the original insight. In capsule form, it is possible for me to observe three foundation blocks of my behavioural response to the world with each of these three being triggered by a sense of being beaten down, or ostracized, by social groups from which I seek support.

And this develops a further insight. In response to apparent rejection my immediate response is to reject those who reject me and draw the conclusion that if they choose to be antisocial then there is no reason to subordinate myself to them, or to seek their company. I remain unbowed in the face of social rejection and will strive to analyze circumstance and motive, both my own and that of the other, and arrive at an improved understanding. This attempt at comprehension is predicated on the belief that such understanding will confer upon me some limited power to alter, or mitigate, or transcend the circumstance which is causing me pain.

To put the above in much simpler terms. It was a beautiful day today, I got some very bad news, and my immediate response was to go goof off with a camera.