12 photos…

I have created a gallery of 12 photos… the best 12 photos I took on the recent trip… (at least today’s choices… my choices could be different tomorrow…) They are not a story about the trip… just 12 images that caught my imagination… My eye…

I took a many more that 12 photos… after a pass through the photos, turning them, editing, deleting the obvious, I have 574 photos taken over 9 days… 5 ports…

I find that I take photos, use photos in three distinct ways… for three purposes… The vacation photos from the recent trip are of all three types… The first type are snapshots, family photos… and most of the photo from this trip, are vacation photos… a way of remembering where we have been… All together are a way of documenting our lives… The second type, are information… taken solely as a form of note taking… there are a couple of museum display labels… a museum information card… a menu… I also take photos of books (but not on this trip)… I have in a few cases taken photos of each page of a book, a magazine, a diary, or a ledger… hundreds of pages to document a single book… They are not about art or composition, but about the information. Finally, the third type of photo, the least common, but the highest form are photos as art… The 12 photos my poor effort as art…

There is a long, now more than 100 year old debate about photos as Art… (Art with a capital A, is a form… a practice…) for some photos are technology, chemistry, documents, but not Art… Others recognize that by the act of taking a photo, framing a photo, you are editing reality, and creating an image… a vision… a moment… Many of my photos are not Art… but some are…

Some are closer to a copy machine, a Xerox machine… just recording…

I do both… for different reasons… Today we are celebrating Art…