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.
