This is a sketch of Sharbat Gula, also known as the “Afghan Girl”, made famous when she was photographed by Steve McCurry and was in the cover of National Geographic Magazine. I think it’s beautiful because of her piercing stare made even more confronting by the intense colour of her iris in contrast to her skin and head scarf. Confrontations or confronting images are beautiful as they allow the engaged participants to maybe learn and grow from a prior ignorant part of them, maybe.
This was taken a few years back when I went to Bangladesh for the first time since I left. It’s a photo of my brother with some kids from the remote village we went to visit. It’s beautiful because at the end of that hot day I couldn’t tell apart from my brother and those kids that he was playing with. I arrived thinking that my family was above something, that perhaps we were more civilised and western than the folks there. The weather and the surrounds revealed that everyone in that photo was alike, having the same reactions and reflexes to its obstacles.
A definition of ‘great’ from the web is ‘remarkable or out of the ordinary in degree or magnitude or effect’. The Blur Building was a very expensive installation by the architects Diller Scofidio + Renfro, which I thought had fit this definition. It’s beautiful because it encompasses the concept of liberating and cleansing our senses from the need for constant sensory stimulation that we receive from western art and architecture. Their opinion is that “Hi-definition is the new orthodox”. Through this temporary building they were able to escape from this orthodoxy, in contradiction using highly defined technology for its construction. 