More Than a Rock

To See as Beautiful39

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 his book The Gay Science, first published in 1882. Some years later (in an unfinished manuscript published after his death) 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. In other words, whether one can aspire to beauty, while also ...