Beauty Fades, Interest Lingers

Aim for beauty, but make sure it’s interesting.

Aim for beauty, but make sure it’s interesting.

I was bored the other night and started scrolling through YouTube. I ended up watching a beautiful piece on Hiroshi Sugimoto, and shortly after, I got alogorithmed (not a word, but it should be) into a video by portrait photographer Ivan Weiss.

I didn’t know him or his work before, but I don’t think anything I’ve come across has better summed up how I feel about art, portraiture, and photography in general.

In a nutshell, he was talking about portraits and why interesting is always better than beautiful.

I love that. I think it perfectly captures what I’m trying to do with portraits and with art as a whole.

Interesting > Beautiful.

If you can manage both, you’re onto something special. But if you have to choose one, I’d pick interesting every time.

The thing is, in modern society, we’re almost trained to think the opposite. Interesting people or things often get labelled as eccentric, weird, or even strange depending on who’s talking. Meanwhile, something that’s conventionally “beautiful” can be completely surface-level and still be praised, even if there’s no real depth behind it.

Now, beauty is important don’t get me wrong. But I think the most beautiful things in life are also interesting. Where we seem to slip up in the modern world is we chase beauty without the interesting. We aim for aesthetic, but forget the story.

Let me give you a few examples that came to mind.

Modern architecture? It's sleek, minimal, beautiful in its own right but compare it to older architecture. The kind of things we used to build as standard in homes fireplaces, ornate skirting boards, detailed architraves there was such character and care in the details.

I’m not an architecture expert by any means, but I took photos recently at a heritage house in Perth, and the difference between the old part and the new extension genuinely blew my mind. The amount of texture, craft, and intention we’ve lost in the name of “modern” is wild.

Zoom out even more. Take the most cutting-edge architectural feats of today huge, impressive structures, absolutely. But now compare them to places like Notre Dame in Paris, the Taj Mahal, or Parliament House in Budapest. Can we really say today’s buildings are as interesting and as beautiful?

To me, beautiful things are just that, abeautiful. But interesting things have layers. They invite you to look twice. To lean in. To wonder.

Ivan used the Mona Lisa as an example, and it’s perfect.

By today’s standards—or even the standards of her time the Mona Lisa isn’t what most would call traditionally beautiful. And yet, Da Vinci created the most famous painting in the world.

Why?

Not because it stuns you with physical beauty, but because of everything else the technique, the mystery of the smile, the use of sfumato, the fact it was stolen in 1911. All those layers make it what it is.
(Yes, I stole most of those facts from Google, but hey I’ve seen the painting in real life, and it really is incredible.)

But you know what’s on the opposite wall of the Mona Lisa in the Louvre?

Veronese’s The Wedding Feast at Cana. It’s absolutely monumental—nearly 7 metres tall and 10 metres wide. Meanwhile, the Mona Lisa is just 77cm by 53cm, and you can’t even get within 4 metres of it. From a distance, it looks about A4-sized.

So why is this tiny painting viewed millions of times more than the one directly behind it?

I think it’s because of everything I’ve just said. The Mona Lisa has that mythology to it. It’s a symbol. A story. A mystery. It’s not just beautiful it’s interesting.

The Wedding Feast at Cana is gorgeous. Technically brilliant. Impressive in every way. But without the mythology, without the hype, without Da Vinci, it doesn’t get that same level of global curiosity.

I’ve been in that room and it genuinely baffles me. People are elbowing each other to get a photo of the Mona Lisa, while behind them is this massive masterpiece that barely gets a glance.

Because beauty pleases the eye.
But interesting interesting captures the mind.

So what does this all mean for me?

Well, with my portraits, especially the ones of artists, I’m not chasing beauty. I don’t want to make people look perfect. I want to make them look true. I want to make something that makes you feel something. That makes you wonder who this person is, what they do, what’s going on behind their work.

The people I photograph are interesting. Their work, their stories, their spaces all fascinating. And if I can even begin to capture that in a portrait, then I’m doing my job.

Sure, if you can make that interestingness beautiful too, then that’s the sweet spot. And often, when you’re photographing an artist covered in paint in their messy studio, you really can get both. There’s a raw beauty in that honesty. That chaos. That aliveness.

And then there’s Gaoth, my latest series.

The feedback has been incredible. I might have already sold a print (which is surreal in itself). But I’ve been thinking a lot about why this one is connecting with people. And I think it’s because it lands in that space between beauty and interest.

At first glance, it’s a series of flower images. Pretty. Soft. Visually striking. But the longer you stay with them, the more you feel what’s underneath, movement, breath, emotion, wind. The presence of something invisible but undeniably there. A force. A rhythm. A story.

There’s enough beauty in the series to pull people in, and enough depth to make them stay.

That’s the balance I’m always aiming for:
Don’t just stop someone with a beautiful image.
Hold them with an interesting one.

Because beauty fades.
But interesting lingers.

With Love,
Adam