THE BODY AS AESTHETIC

For me, aesthetic is something that pleases my eyes, something that make them smile and warm up my soul.It doesn't have to be beautiful, because it doesn't have anything to do with that word.It's what you feel, what I feel, what every single person feels when they look at something or when they touch something.It's desire, it's love ,it's nothing to do with thinking or logic, it's just feelings all over the place.

Beauty doesn't exist because it's not real, it's just a word, what really is important is the aesthetic, that thing or that person you see and feel in love with immediately.


Robert Mapplethorpe captures the beauty as an abstract form of symmetry in the photograph called „Milton Moore” .When you first take a look at this photograph you might not understand the true meaning, but if you look long enough you will see the perfect symmetry of the body as a shape.




That is what you will find in Edward Weston’s photographs although slightly different.
In the photograph „Nudes,Charis, Arms and Legs” (1934) he transforms the human body into an aesthetic and symmetric shape which I find beautiful and very nice to look at.



And again in „Nude” (1936), he captures the body in an unusual position which makes it again, symmetrical and aesthetic.



And to come back on what I was saying earlier, the photographer Joel-Peter Witkin who for many might not ring a bell when you talk about aesthetics, for me it does.
In his photographs he captures people with disabilities or even dead.
Though that sounds unaesthetic, I think that he transforms the bodies of those people into something beautiful.
In „La Serpentine, Marseilles” (1992), by positioning the woman in that posture he creates something different, something asymmetrical.
If the woman were to stand straight, the photograph would have become something completely different.






These photographers, just like John Lamprey in the 1850s, transform the human bodies into objects.


But it is differently because in the 1850s, some people like Mayans or Pilgrims were treated as objects, because of their race and religion. They were researched and photographed as experiments.
Now we don’t do that technically, but we transform human bodies into something differently, into art.