More Than a Rock, 2nd Edition

To See as Beautiful41

Most creative photographs are departures from reality and it seems to take a higher order of craft to make this departure than to simulate reality.

—Ansel Adams

“I want to learn more and more to see as beautiful what is necessary in things; then I shall be one of those who make things beautiful,” wrote Friedrich Nietzsche in The Gay Science, first published in 1882. A few years later, he wrote, “To experience a thing as beautiful means: to experience it necessarily wrongly.” I sometimes wonder whether Nietzsche changed his mind, or, perhaps, if the two statements are in fact not in contradiction. One can revere and aspire to beauty while also acknowledging that it may be a mischaracterization of the real world.

Beauty is ...