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The job of the photographer, in my view, is not to catalogue indisputable fact but to be coherent about intuition and hope. This is not to say that he is unconcerned with the truth.
– Robert Adams, Beauty
in Photography
Entropy is the abiding inconvenient truth of life. At its most acute, entropy is death. But life itself, even in its most commonplace moments, routinely feels as though it's either verging on or actually dissolving into chaos. Both in our individual lives and more broadly, perhaps as much in our day as in Yeats’s, things fall apart, the center cannot hold, mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.As we fear and loathe death, so do we entropy. Beauty in art is an antidote to it. To have its remedial effect – to infuse us with the courage and solace we seek in it – art has to be rooted in life, with all its randomness, disarray and decay. But art also has to rise above life, as a flower does above the mire: enthralling, heartening and consoling us with structure, equilibrium, composure, integrity, coherence, harmony, light, hope.
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