PAPER DREAMS

BY MATTHEW ROLSTON

What’s the stuff that dreams are made of? Well, in a photograph that would be light. Light is beauty. Beauty is light.

But is beauty real or just an illusion? Understand, long before there was science, before there was photography, there was perception and there was beauty.

It’s really quite simple. It starts with light. Light strikes an object, it refracts through the lens of the eye (or of the camera) and creates vibrations in the soul.

Light is home. Light is comfort. Light can create desire. Light changes everything.

Think of the light you have been drawn to: sunrise...winter light...a sunset...the stars at night...a candle’s flame. Each one evokes a different emotion. Anyone that has ever lit a candle in their home has created beauty with light, and even if they didn’t realize what they had done, they most certainly felt it.

But what is the essence of light? It is fire...which means, above all, survival. Why? Because fire was the first form of light (and warmth) that we could control...our first move to control nature, to make it serve us. That’s why we are so compelled by light. It’s a primitive urge. We are hardwired as humans to love light.

Concepts of light and beauty are intrinsically related. The Greek myth of Prometheus is one of the great creation myths in Western culture. The story explains how man came to understand fire, to become civilized. In the Greek tale, Prometheus stole fire from Zeus and gave it to mortals for their use. Zeus, angered, created the first woman, Pandora... bringing men the twin tortures of beauty and desire.

A photograph can also have the power to induce desire with an impossible reality. How could anything or anyone be that perfect, and why would we care? It’s because the concept of ideal beauty was born with our notion of perfection. Humans are deeply imperfect. We know that, and yet we still need to imagine perfection. This is one of the many paradoxes of human nature. The concept of God may have been born from this innate and deeply human need.

Beauty can be read as an unreal God-like dream. In Hollywood, that divinity has been debased, even twisted, yet it is still upheld. Goddess worship is at the root of this kind of beauty, only nowadays we gather to worship in front of a silver screen.

Non-Western societies and primitive cultures don’t necessarily have this thing we call beauty. Yes, the women in those cultures have traditional costumes and paint, elements that help them inhabit their roles, but those traditional costumes are eternal within those cultures. They don’t change from year to year. Neither do the roles. There’s no ‘spring collection’. Instead, there are ‘rites of spring’.

We are mammals. Warm-blooded creatures. Males are seemingly designed to mate with as many appropriate and available females as possible in order to propagate the species. Our culture, with its focus on such things as marriage and monogamy doesn’t allow for that. That’s another reason beauty exists...to resolve the needs of our biology with our society’s values.Western beauty concepts shape modern goddesses into changelings, forcing them to impersonate the multiple partners that our biology demands.

In still other ways, the very concept of modern beauty seems to exist to deny certain frightening realities.

Beauty may be the only way we can shield ourselves from the abject fear of terrible naked truths: abandonment, infirmity, death, and ultimately the greatest fear, to be forgotten. Without our concepts of beauty, we’d be forced to stare an unbearable reality in the face.

Beauty helps us mitigate the pitiful rituals of modern life and celebrate the gods and goddesses that walk among us. Photography has allowed me to capture the extraordinary light that emanates from these unique beings. Rather than simply capture and reflect that light, my goal is to transmit it, through the printed page, the Pictures at a Magazine.

Today, print photography is retreating in the face of a swiftly advancing digital culture. This new media has its own powerful seductions.

beautyLIGHT exists to memorialize the iconic power of the traditional printed image on sensual, luscious, precious paper... paper dreams.

Beverly Hills
July 2008