The Beauty of Imperfections in Photography

"Perfection is overrated," said the Tao one morning.

"Why do you say so?" asked the new student. "Everyone is looking for perfection everywhere. I had gone for this fashion photography class yesterday. The actual photography took very little time, of the order of ten minutes perhaps. The rest of the time, about three hours, the teacher spent on teaching us how to use Photoshop to remove imperfections."

"And how did he define perfection?" the Tao was curious.

"Well, it appeared that, for perfection to be achieved, the skin needed to be smooth, without any blemish at all," said the student. "So we learnt how to smoothen the skin, and how to brighten the eyes. In the next class he is going to teach us to lighten the skin, stretch the neck, make the limbs slender, the body sexier ..."

"It sounds like that the perfect human being does not exist, then," the Tao said.

"You may say so, O Tao," said the student. "I think perfection is an aspiration, rather than reality."

"Why don't you photograph imperfect things, then?" asked the Tao. "There is beauty in things as they exist, in their glorious imperfection. May be you will be surprised at how beautiful they can look."

"But, that brings up a different question: What is beauty?" asked the student, "How do we define beauty? Is it one of those aspirational things?"

"We will talk about that another time," the Tao said with a smile.