I think the main problem I have with Constable is that his images have been used so much and so frequently that I have become de-sensitised to them and they almost look tacky and a cliche.

A bit like Vivaldi’s Four Seasons!!!

I think everything is inherently fascinating and emotive if you look hard enough, but for me certain things are just plain ugly. That doesn’t necessarily mean I don’t think they should be there, just that visually they lack whatever criteria my brain has decided is beautiful. I never saw an un-aesthetic thing in my life, but I’ve seen many un-beautiful things.

Ugly things hold amazing properties and decontextualised perhaps they take on a sort of beauty for me – this is what photography is good at as it decontextualises the visual from the observers world view, challenging their ideas of aesthetics. If it’s a good and clever shot, a normally ugly thing might be beautiful. A dead body, for instance (thinking about that autposy program). If you saw a dead body, freshly murdered, it would be hard to deem it beautiful on all but the most detached and sterile level. If, however, that body is displayed to you in such a way as to make you consider the wonder of it, then it takes on a sense of beauty.

If the photographer can leave the viewer with as sense of that beauty when they next view the subject in the real world then yeah, maybe there are no ugly things, we just need to see things in a different way to bring out their beauty. But isn’t this a construct in itself? Are you not then finding someone elses idea of a scene beautiful rather than having a personal emotive response? Does that invalidate your original response and mean that thing was never ugly? And are subjects actually different depending on context (eg, the murdered body / the informative autopsy – these two dead bodies, although the same by definition, are utterly different subject matter and open to different aesthetic reactions).