Whitman thought he was not abolishing beauty but generalizing it. So, for generations, did the most gifted American photographers, in their polemical pursuit of the trivial and the vulgar. But among American photographers who have matured since World War II, the Whitmanesque mandate to record in its entirety the extravagant candors of actual American experience has gone sour. In photographing dwarfs, you don't get majesty & beauty. You get dwarfs.

The particular qualities and intentions of photographs tend to be swallowed up in the generalized pathos of time past.

Evans wanted his photographs to be 'literate, authoritative, transcendent.' The moral universe of the 1930s being no longer ours, these adjectives are barely c…

Art today is a new kind of instrument, an instrument for modifying consciousness and organizing new modes of sensibility. And the means for practicing art have…

So successful has been the camera's role in beautifying the world that photographs, rather than the world, have become the standard of the beautiful.

Ruskin's special gift was the feeling for beauty, in nature as in art. It was in Beauty that his nature led him to seek reality, and his entirely religious lif…

The blessed damozel lean'd out From the gold bar of Heaven; Her eyes were deeper than the depth Of waters still'd at even; She had three lilies in her hand, An…