Beauty

What is beauty? What is beautiful?To be able to call something beautiful we have to live in duality in a world of opposites. To call somebody short there must be somebody tall, if there is poor there must be rich and if there is beauty there must be ugliness. To judge something we need a point of reference.We are told on a daily basis what is beautiful by all kinds of advertisements, celebrities, talk shows, and magazines. The main purpose of doing so to make us feel that we are not beautiful, that we do not fit in and will not be accepted if we do not act in a certain way of buy a specific product.But is that true? Is there beauty and is there ugliness or are both a very subjective experience? Would we still see one thing as beautiful and another as ugly if we would not brainwashed to have certain opinions?I got my first batch of chromes back from the lab for my leaf project and did a quick scan of one of the slides. It is an image of a leaf that I found in my roommates room. It is about two inches long and must have died moths ago.But recovered from the floor and shot against a white background it reveals a tremendous amount of grace and beauty.What does that show us? Does beauty exist everywhere if we have the eye to see it? Does only beauty exist after we transcend duality?Does ugliness only exist in our minds?    "Beauty" Williamsburg/Brooklyn/Studio shot of dried leaf 11-24-08 about 03:00 PM

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