The Serendipitous Aesthetics, or Capturing Beauty by Chance

Within Philosophy, aesthetics is that branch responsible for studying the essence and perception of beauty. Yes, beauty can be objective; therefore, we can also say that beauty isn’t necessarily as subjective as it’s made out to be in modern culture. When talking about photographic aesthetics, we can take certain parameters from the plastic arts to evaluate the aesthetics of any image. We can easily identify composition as the mandatory element of aesthetics in photography, followed, on a smaller scale, by proportion.

Serendipity describes the phenomenon in which you make a lucky and unexpected finding when you’re looking for something else, or not looking for it at all. In more general terms, “serendipity” can also be called chance, coincidence or accident, but the word serendipity is too beautiful not to use.

In street photography, we often have serendipitous encounters. This is because everything happens mostly without our control or consent, which is why we should always be aware and ready to shoot. The purpose of this column is not reflective, but inspirational. In the past two weeks, I have had 7 interviews with students in a photography class (in my country there is no formal academic degree program, just courses or diplomas) whose careers are related to communications and graphic design. The questions were…