Year End Wonder

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Wonder Horse
Wonder Horse, March 2010





Yikes. I've been away. Not in body but in spirit, and no time to post for far too long.

Hasn't the year just galloped past? Not for me.

This hobby horse appeared on my front stoop early in the year, randomly, and then one day disappeared. I remember wondering why and where it had come from. I also remember that seeing it each morning reminded me of whimsy, curiosity, and imagination. I'm remembering all this again, suddenly, because I've just rediscovered the picture.

And more: in thinking about this past year, the thought occurs that Wonder Horse is a fairly accurate illustration of right now — a lot of motion but not much movement. That's the way 2010 feels to me here at the end.

Picture-mining is the year-end ritual of sorting moments from the past twelve months. When we used film we'd do this by pulling out the proof sheets (not the edited prints) from the year and passing them around. Or the boxes of never-discarded slides. (See Kodachrome if you haven't.)

Today, of course, we dig the data/sort of the Lightroom catalog. I'm showing 6,900 frames from 2010. That's an oddly round number. But there's still another day or two left to messy it up.

If you've got a moment to take a breath now, before the new rush begins, I recommend it -- linger a bit in the moments that snapped your attention from the last twelve months. What were you thinking? What stands out? Can you see themes in the moments that mattered in the pictures?

The exercise feels like mapping the time we passed together.

Regular lens warp
Lens Warp, Houston, March 2010


I've written about this idea before here, and it's part of the regular conversation in class too.

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