Increased familiarity does not entirely explain why certain conventions of beauty get used up while others remain. The attrition is moral as well as perceptual. Strand and Weston could hardly have imagined how these notions of beauty could become so banal, yet it seems inevitable once one insists—as Weston did—on so bland an ideal of beauty as perfection. Whereas the painter, according to Weston, has always “tried to improve nature by self-imposition,” the photographer has “proved that nature offers an endless number of perfect ‘compositions,’—order everywhere.” Behind the modernist’s belligerent stance of aesthetic purism lay an astonishingly generous acceptance of the world.