What do you consider beautiful and why?

Melvin Moten challenged me on Friday to define my concept of beauty.

Oh dear. Time for another incredibly long blog post, then.

It really isn’t possible for me to define what beauty is for everyone, because beauty is subjective. Everyone will have a different concept of what they find beautiful, so we’ll just go for my view.

Now I read Harpers and Queen as much as the next girl. I do love my fantasies. The images of women inside are beautiful, no doubt about it, but I’m not kidding myself – they are an illusion, a mixture of good photography, MUA’s and Photoshop. Great Art though. And an enjoyable fantasy on a warm summer’s evening when I’m curled up on the sofa drinking a glass of chilled chardonnay. I don’t kid myself that I could ever look like that, and nor would I want to, truth be told. I bet those models don’t look so great when they get up in the morning after four hours sleep either. I don’t look at those images and think, wow they are beautiful, I have to look like that…in fact the images are often pretty samey after a while. So beautiful women in womens' magazines? Nope, not real beauty to me, I’m afraid.

To me, real beauty is the beauty of the soul.

AMOST ALL people, no matter who they are, have something beautiful inside them. To me, the psyche defines the person, and it is irrelevant what they look like.
I just don’t care.

I have found beauty in the most unlikely places, as well as the most conventional ones. I have several friends who have suffered tremendously with cancer, and come out of it with dignity, courage and a burning thirst for life. They may be bald from the chemo, emaciated, exhausted, tired and grumpy, but their spirits are all beautiful because they remain undefeated by their ordeal.

O.K. you say, but what about people who have done evil? There’s no beauty in them.

Many moons ago, I used to do befriending work in my spare time with prisoners – letter writing, visiting them in prison (because no-one else would) and so forth. I met quite a few unfortunates whom society locked up and threw away the key. I wrote to and visited several guys over the years. It was difficult stuff, and sometimes hard for me to cope with emotionally, but I persisted, and one or two even became (almost) friends. On the whole they were nice people, usually “normal” (whatever that is), severely mentally scarred of course, and they had done terrible things, but these guys definitely had inner beauty, the same as you and I.

One guy, who hacked his girlfriend to death with a kitchen-knife, eventually had the immense courage to face his wrong-doing. He knew he had evil inside him, he faced it, and wanted to talk about it, although it took him two years before he could trust me enough to tell me exactly what happened on that awful night when he committed the murder. Now if It had been my daughter who had been murdered, I’m damn sure I wouldn’t have found any inner beauty in him at all, but as it is, prison befrienders have to try to look beyond the evil, to try to help these people, to convince them that there is a way back from the abyss, that their soul does possess the capacity to be beautiful. And if being a prison befriender sounds like a weird thing to do, so be it. But it certainly gives you a unique insight into good and evil.

So do I see myself as beautiful? Well, of course I run myself down in the blog sometimes, much to the annoyance of many of you, but yes, I DO see myself as beautiful, and ugly too.

Have you ever read D.H. Lawrence ?
He had a concept running through many of his books called “ugly beautiful”. Basically you can’t have one without the other. Ugly and beautiful aren’t far apart at all. They are both inside us, and they are inexorably intertwined. When I look at myself, I have both beauty and ugliness inside and out. I am, after all, only human, and I am both good and evil. Not in the same balance as the guy who murdered his girlfriend, of course, but still a mixture of light and dark.

Such is the nature of the soul.

Daniel Defoe once said, “The soul is placed in the body like a rough diamond, and must be polished, or the lustre of it will never appear”

I’d like to think that good photographers help take out that diamond, admire its beauty and its flaws, and then give it a quick polish, before putting it back in the box.




The lovely Kate, from last year.