It's strange that there is an apparently objective, value-free aesthetic ideal for personal photographs. What is the endgame here? The look of fashion magazines

It's strange that there is an apparently objective, value-free aesthetic ideal for personal photographs. What is the endgame here? The look of fashion magazines and advertisements? Because hey, like Gruber, I'm also an unattractive mid-30s gremlin, nothing like a fashion model. My wife, whom I love, is not Kate Moss either. I used to run around with Dianas and Holgas - plastic cameras with plastic lenses that expose 120 film (medium or 4x5 format). Half of the shots turn out unusable, which gets really expensive -- but the half that turns out good is great. Unlike my (cheap SE) iPhone images, they have a quality that's uncannily "real". Like real people living real lives. And when I say "strange" I don't necessarily mean "bad"; just that it sure looks that we will soon be normalizing the hard-to-notice glitches of ML models and miss them in "normal" photos. With cheap plastic cameras you knew that the artifacts (light streaks, dust on lenses...) were artifacts. --- Next up: thanatropism complains about auto-tuners in modern pop music.