Maybe. At least that’s what people keep saying.
What probably comes more often: White hair.
…or at least gray hair. Wrinkles. Spots.
This is the second version of this post.
In the first one, I indulged in a sincere, admiring analysis of all this.
So I’ll keep it brief this time:
All of this is beauty! And that’s what I want to talk about.
What brings me to this?
I’m a hobby photographer and I’m also trying my hand at photographing people.
I notice that very different things can attract me to people.
Essentially two categories—the boundaries are fluid.
Category 1 – “A Matter of Type”
There are simply people who catch my attention—regardless of age.
Sometimes relatively young men and women… Between 20 and 30 (who often don’t even dare—even when the portraits aren’t meant to be published at all).
And sometimes clearly “older” people (who dare more often, but almost never get in touch to receive their pictures).
What connects these two groups is that they seem to be the archetype of a certain appearance.
In my eyes, they usually represent a whole bunch of people, whom they embody in a very personal way through their unique presence.
Category 2 – The “Causa pulchritudo”1
For me, beauty has been nothing superficial since I got a camera.
“Pretty” and “beautiful” are not interchangeable.
Young people are pretty. And they become beautiful over the years and with the wit they acquire along the way.
Beauty, for me, also often depends on the people themselves and my personal connection to them—if I have one.
For example: People I feel connected to, whose company I’m allowed to share, I find without exception beautiful.
I think it’s partly because I get to spend enough time with them to experience them happy. Or to see them laugh.
People I don’t know, on the other hand, and to whom I have no personal connection, I find beautiful when they have a special presence and special, personal characteristics.
Here too, how I experience them when we meet plays a role.
For example, it happens that someone who has almost passed me by and seems quite grumpy and closed off literally blossoms in the split second when a genuine, warm smile answers my greeting.
“Suddenly”2 these people are a work of art.
Suddenly I experience very personal and unique external features as something valuable and inseparably connected to this beautiful person.
A wafer-thin wisdom
I’m glad I discovered this treasure.
If you find that trivial… Okay.
For me, it has opened up a whole world full of beauty that, in my experience, only becomes richer with the years.
I believe, even without a personal connection, that a person’s very own and special life story can be reflected in their surface.
That is beauty to me.
Human or mannequin
We live. And then we die.
And all of this… Our hair, our skin… The wrinkles and spots and scars.
All of this are traces of our lives.
These traces don’t come by themselves!
They come with the years and with experience.
We earn them.
Who wants to always look like eternal youth?
This strangely absurd idea that we’ve been telling ourselves over and over since the beginning of humanity.
Always young. Always healthy. Always fresh. As if time simply passed us by…
Like Barbie and Ken, in their original packaging, in a closet and forgotten by time and still like new out of sheer boredom?!
A creepy thought!
If we’re going to be like Barbie or Ken, then with all the traces that a good and interesting life can leave behind.
Worn and played with and loved by life.
Marks
Just look at people.
Your parents and grandparents. The people you meet on the street and who pass you by.
Just look at these hands.
Calloused hands that have worked hard… Or hands that have become chapped from cleaning and washing and doing dishes…
Hands that have rocked children and hands that threw earth into the graves of loved ones.
Hands tell stories.
Just look at the wrinkles around the eyes, mouth, and on the forehead.
What do they tell? Of carefree laughter or of deep grief and worries?
Was this face often in the sun? In the wind? Or often in offices or factories?
What do the eyes tell? Are they tired from having to? Are they alert and full of kindness? What haven’t they seen?
All these marks are earned. They represent a life full of experiences.
If you and I live long enough, we will carry our own marks.
And they are worth welcoming and embracing.
AI. Artificial Intelligence.
A technology that is trained with great effort to make connections—but is otherwise as dumb as a hundred meters of dirt road.
The data it learns from includes the internet, books, magazines, films, and photos…
Billions of texts. From great literature to the dumbest possible comment on social media.
Billions of images. Videos. Sounds.
Everything we humans (humanity as a whole) have produced and stored digitally somewhere.
And an AI doesn’t “understand.” Everything is equally correct to AI. And the more frequently something is found, the stronger the “found” connection.
I like to use AI to force my ideas, the images in my head, into a form of existence that you can look at as an illustration of my posts. I simply can’t paint…
But an AI is not creative.
It’s not only dumb, despite everything available to it. It’s also uninspired.
It doesn’t come close to the intellectual height of true creation. It’s just a tool.
Having said that:
I’ve included an image of a grandmother in the text above.
Largely as I imagined her. With characteristics I’ve observed in a multitude of people.
That actually wasn’t easy to achieve.
Because the AI, in response to my prompts and descriptions—which literally included wrinkles, gray hair, sagging skin, soft skin, age spots, being overweight, and more, as well as a kind face, a sharp mind, warmth, beauty… always only produced “models.” Not unlike the women advertising shows us when it promises eternal youth and perpetual continence. Or that age and incontinence can at least be irrelevant to us because we can feel young and continent if we buy this or that.
How many versions did I generate to get the image in the text?
I stopped counting at 20. It was a test of patience.
Why am I telling you this?
Remember: An AI is not creative. It has learned connections that already exist. That WE have created.
And one of them, a particularly stable connection, seems to be that grandmothers are only allowed to look old to a limited extent if they are also “beautiful” at the same time.
I got the impression that for many (and therefore: also for AI) “old” and “beautiful” are contradictory.
And I find that very sad.
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