The mysterious ways of beauty in photography - Hans Aarsman at TEDxAmsterdam

Surprising, insightful and at times hilarious, Aarsman shows different concepts of beauty in photography, and suggests that the only real photographic beauty is to be found in pictures that were made without such a goal in mind.

If you happen to like beautiful photographs,

you probably won't like what I am going to say

therefore, let's start where it all began,

sometimes it makes it easier to think along.

For me, it started with the work of a photographer;

Arsath Ro'is,

he worked for the Amsterdam municipality

a civil servant,

and his job was to record the changing city.

Every morning he would take his moped

and drive to the outskirts of Amsterdam --

where the buildings sites were

and the tunnels were digged and the ring road was built --

There was always a lot of sand in his pictures

and that's why the civil servants he worked with,

called him the "sand photographer."

You probably noticed already

that there is a moped in every image --

the story goes like this:

one day Arsath Ro'is was taking a photo on a building site,

and he was just focusing on his camera and the subject,

and behind his back somebody was stealing his moped.

(Laugher)

And he swore never to leave his moped out of sight.

(Laugher)

So, what have we got here:

we've got very straightforward photography,

there are no artistic ambitions.

Arsath Ro'is was not interested in taking interesting photographs,

he just wanted to do his job

and he didn't want his moped to be stolen again.

And that is what makes him so authentic.

Now I'll mention a photographer

with artistic ambitions:

there was a time that I was a photographer with artistic ambitions --

(Laughter)

You know, I had shows in galleries, and in museums,

I made books, there were concepts,

and projects and themes and series and subjects --

I could have bought a moped

(Laughter)

and put it in every image that I took

I could have adopted a surrealistic style, a straight forward style,

I even could have had success with it,

but it would have been just another concept,

it would have been fake,

and would not have been authentic at all.

Isn't is weird that somebody working for the municipality

is more authentic than an artist may ever be?

Mind you, a civil servant, working from 9 to 5.

There are two things that you can conclude from this:

one thing is, it's dangerous to have artistic ambitions,

they may prevent you from being authentic;

second, if you really want to make interesting pictures,

you shouldn't want to make them.

Do you want me to repeat that?

(Laughter)

So, after I saw the work of Arsath Ro'is

and I realised what it meant,

I dropped the projects and the concepts,

and the themes and the series and the subjects --

I sold my equipment,

I threw away half of my negatives,

and the rest I sold to the Dutch Photo Museum,

Nederlands Fotomuseum,

and I persuaded them to put it

downloadable for free on their web site, high res[olution]

so you could make prints like this of it.

Sometimes people send me a picture

of what they have done with my picture --

(Laughter)

it may look that I'd done this

all in a whim,

but in fact it took me years to do it.

But, man, what a relief.

Finally I could see what there is to see.

Most photography is not about seeing what there is to see,

most photography is about presenting the world

in a well composed way

and that is not easy to do, because the world is very chaotic,

and you have to be very skilled as a photographer to do it;

and when you do it as a photographer, people say:

"You are a good photographer! Look at this image,

what a beautiful image, it's almost like a painting" --

(Laughter)

And it's not a modern painting it's not [unclear]

it's old-fashioned, 17th, 18th century, 19th century painting.

In 1816, a French naval ship named "The Medusa"

sank to the bottom of the sea,

and 147 seamen managed to get on a raft.

They floated around for two weeks,

many died, and eventually 15 seamen were saved.

Two years later, in 1818,

the French painter, Theodore Gericault painted this ordeal.

And now we go to 2008,

Georgian army invaded South Ossetia,

the Russian army expelled them very soon,

and this is a picture of soldiers

retreating from South Ossetia --

You see the connection?

I can show a lot of pictures like this,

with all this connection between painting and photography,

but I'm not going to do it, I trust that you think alone.

I'll only show this one:

a picture I made myself in 1998,

it is very popular, people like it very much,

it's the most downloaded from the internet

of the web site of the Nederlands Fotomuseum.

Do you know why people like this picture?

Because it resembles almost every picture

of Caspar David Friedrich.

(Laughter)

And it's not on purpose that people like it,

it's not on purpose that I made it this way,

it's unaware,

it's something we carry around with us,

it's our cultural history.

And of course in the beginning I liked it when people said:

this is a beautiful picture,

you are a good photographer.

But there came a moment that I thought:

I want to see what there is to see

and not be dictated by painting all the time,

old fashioned painting all the time.

Can photography have a beauty of its own?

And if beauty is too much to ask,

can it be interesting on its own?

Interesting -- if you really want to make interesting pictures,

you shouldn't try to make them.

So I stopped --

This is a photography that falls on your doormat every week,

it is inside the leaflets of the supermarkets.

This is how supermarkets present the meat they offer,

anybody thinking about photography now?

Now you think of meat!

This photography is so uninteresting,

that you forget photography, you just think about the subject.

and that is what makes it interesting to me.

(Laughter)

There is a big realm of things

to discover in this area of photography.

These are the ones I love the most.

Everybody should have this picture on his desk,

then you don't have to crack your brain anymore

which size is bigger: A4, A3, A6 --

(Laughter)

So, I started to collect this kind of photography,

but then I had to move to a smaller apartment,

I mean, I was a photographer, I stopped photographies,

it is going to cost you --

And to fit in myself, I had to throw away a lot of stuff,

and in the meantime, the pallets of uninteresting photographs

were getting bigger and bigger,

should I throw away the pallets of uninteresting photographs,

or should I throw away

the puppets my mother made in the old-peoples home?

Every time she made a puppet --

(Laughter)

I'm just going to put a jacket on the remaining time.

(Laughter) (Applause)

Every time she made a puppet,

she would show it to me and then said:

"Do you like it?" "Mom, it's great!"

and then she said, of course, "Do you want to have it?"

and I said, "Yes, I'd really like to have it."

So I got lots of this puppets in my house,

I held them above the bin, but I couldn't let loose.

It felt like betraying my mother's memory.

Then I thought, memory, isn't photography about memory?

So I bought a camera again,

took pictures of the puppets of my mother,

held them above the bin and could let loose.

In that way I managed to throw away a lot of stuff.

(Laughter)

This is a childhood rocket,

I mean, what does a big grown up man

do with this stuff that is for children --

I didn't throw it away, I gave it away.

This is my television set,

people of the television area don't have to worry,

it is not going to be any E-trend,

because it was taken away in a minute.

I wrote on it : "Steal in order."

And then I got a phone call from Foam Magazine,

it is an international, notorious photography magazine,

and they said, "We heard that you are in the possession of a camera again,"

I said, "Yes, I have to confess,

I am in the possession of a camera again."

"What do you do with it?"

I said, "Well, I just take pictures of things I throw away,"

(Laughter)

And they said, "We would like to see it"

And before I knew, I had 24 pages in this magazine

on things I threw away.

(Applause)

This, I didn't throw away,

I found out that you can use photography also

to prevent you from buying things you don't really need.

(Laughter)

Yeah.

I managed to postpone buying this computer for a year,

I just waited until a spilled a cup of coffee on the old one.

And it was published in the beginning of 2008,

the title was "Photography against consumerism."

A few months later, the credit crisis started,

so you can see what you can achieve with photography?

If you skip the painting --

So, I was back in business again, but not really,

I was not really back in business,

because I wasn't going to look for the next subject,

and project, and theme and series and whatever,

it just happened that I wanted to throw away stuff

and photography seemed to help,

so I just took pictures of it,

I wasn't interested in making interesting pictures,

I was just interested in throwing away stuff.

So, then you start wondering,

"What makes a picture interesting?"

Do you think this is an interesting picture?

It was taken half a year ago,

a boy shot in a school, teachers and fellow students

and then he shot himself,

and among the things people put in front of the school,

there was this panel in the background

in English it says, "God, where were you?"

Well, those questions are not easy to answer.

There was another question as well,

"Warum", which means "Why", in English,

which is even more difficult to answer,

and here we have the mysterious creator of this panels

by the looks of him,

he is not so interested in answering the questions

but more in need of some attention.

And that is what he was going to get.

(Laughter)

But I was wondering -- I have seen this guy before --

and, do you know, the "R" in this panels

and the question mark are very strange?

in "Warum" as well,

So, I did some research and I came across --

do you remember, a year ago,

this guy who put his daughter in a basement

and made children with her in Austria? --

Frittzel -- this is his house,

and this is the mysterious creator,

and now he writes, "How ever could it come to this?"

and the "Warum" again is showed weirdly,

it's something like "not again."

And still, this was not his coming out,

his coming out was in 2007, December the 17th,

it was also in Germany,

here, this woman had shot herself and her children

and he put "Warum" and the old panels in front of the house,

on the pavement,

and two days later he managed to get them next to the door.

But this is not the end.

Do you remember this year Queen's Day?

The third of April, this guy bumped into the crowd,

and bumped into the monuments,

among the things people put there

to show their sympathy --

(Laughter)

Well, in a purely aesthetical, formal way,

this is not beautiful photography,

but there is something else in it,

there is something to discover, there is something to find.

And that is what we can call beauty too

but it's another kind of beauty,

it's not a beauty of the old fashioned painting,

but it is a beauty of the scientific discovery,

of the [mathemathical] formula,

of the simple solution to a complicated problem,

of investigation.

And suddenly I found myself writing for "De Volkskrant,"

it is a big dutch newspaper,

analysing pictures in this investigative way that I just showed you.

And this is what I wrote about the "Warum" guy

and I was very happy that every week

I could tell my story about photography

in a different, not-paintily way,

but it was one drawback,

and it was that I only could show one picture

I couldn't show my research,

and then "De Volkskrant" came up

with a very simple solution to this complicated problem.

They gave me two pages instead of half a page,

so now I can analyze complete stories on photography

I've got more space for my research

and I've got more space for myself,

because I earn a bit more money,

and I've moved to a bigger apartment.

Thank you very much.

(Applause)