[drcy]

Anyone who collects Pre-War cards should know something about photography, as many early baseball cards are real photographs: Old Judge N172 and N173s, Lone Jack, Peck & Snyder, Topps Magic Photos and numerous others. I collected baseball cards long before I got into photography, but as a card collector I figured out I should learn something about photographs. If you collect early baseball cards, chances are you own some photos-- even if you don't realize it. If a card collector owns an Old Judge, he owns a photograph. That's what Old Judges are-- little albumen photos.

I like photography, because a photo is a snapshot in time of a story and you don't know what is the whole story. Sometimes you have no idea what is going on. As with all art, it involves viewer imagination and personal interpretation. All my favorite photos involve an ongoing story/scene where you can only guess what is going on-- but you know something is going on. Some photos are historical documents, some are interesting, some beautiful and some are dark and haunting.

As photographer Diane Arbus famously said about art photography: 'A picture is a secret about a secret. The more it tells you the less you know."

There are photos for everyone and every taste and interest and budget, because photos comes in all forms and sizes and covers all subjects: sports, movies, presidents, family photos, animals, nature, war, still lifes, etc etc etc. Some are artworks suitable for a museum wall, some are you family picnic snapshots for your refrigerator door, some are straight foreword realistic images, some are experimental avant garde. There's something for everyone. If you take and gather iphone photos and keep them in folder on your computer or uploaded to facebook for friends and family to see you are collecting digital photos. They may have no financial resale value or ever be printed out into physical paper form, but you're still collecting digital images.

Everyone collects and enjoys photos, even if they don't formally think of themselves as photo collectors or fans. If you have your grandmother's old family photo albums, you own a photo collection. If you have Kodak family snapshots on your office bulletin board, you display photos. If you take digital snapshots of your kid at his soccer game, you're creating a digital photo collection. If you collect Hollywood or baseball autographs you undoubtedly own some autographed photos. If you have a shoe box of your 1980s family holiday slides, you own a photo collection.

Not everyone collects baseball cards, beanie babies, Hollywood autographs or Civil War artifacts, but everyone owns a collection of photos in some shape or form.