Beauty and Truth Are Friends

Beauty is everywhere. Photographer Roy DeCarava found it in his neighborhood in Harlem. His black and white photographs of neighbors and celebrities, of people doing what they enjoy or think important, were featured on CBS Sunday Morning recently when he was remembered as a notable person who died in 2009. Pictured were some of his images and these words, “It doesn’t have to be pretty to be true, but if it’s true it’s beautiful.” Just as the poet Keats made a connection between truth and beauty, so did DeCarava. And it kept him in his neighborhood and at his lens.

We live in a culture where pretty is often mistaken for beauty. Pretty is a good thing, and often fun. Truth as its friend reveals the beauty in pretty. “…and if it’s true it’s beautiful.” Truth can also show us beauty crumbling into ugliness. Glamour fades. Fortunes are lost. The beautiful people are revealed with clay feet, not able to sustain their glamor or good fortune when brought to the light of truth…. unless…unless they have made, or are ready to make, friends with truth. If they have built a relationship with truth, no matter how distant, or if they desire to build a friendship with truth, no matter how difficult or time consuming, a beautiful inner light shines out from within. It shines out moving beyond our cultural norms of what is pretty and what is not. Some may have looked at DeCarava’s images from his neighborhood in Harlem and seen ugliness, displeasing narratives, deficiency or threat. The artist saw truth and beauty. 

Where others see ugliness in neighbors and neighborhoods, and even ugliness in us, may our friend truth show us beauty and all its possibilities.