Eye Guess: A Photographic Review of 2013. Well, one aspect of the year, anyway.

2013 was a year in which many things changed in my life. One of the best new opportunities was becoming house photographer for Legionarts, a non-profit organization promoting the arts in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. I photographed a lot of performances at CSPS Hall during the past year. As is customary, I've selected a few of my favorites to post here as a "year in review" effort.

I started with the idea of the usual Top 10 list. What sort of Top 10? Shows with the largest audience? Photos that are the "best" (meaning would they do well in a photo contest)? How about Top 10 Favorites? Favorite shows or Favorite photos? Do I choose my personal favorites, track hits on my online gallery, or have others vote on them?

In the end I decided to go with my personal favorites. These are the ones which, when I look at them, remind me of what I felt during the performance. While being a performance photographer is a lot of fun, there are times I'm concentrating so much on the photography I miss the show itself. Looking back on these photos helps me remember the experience as more than just a photo gig.

I also couldn't settle on only 10. I thought about going with a Top 25, but that would be a lot of photos for posting on a blog like this. Also, people will easily look through 10 photos, but 25 seems to be a bit beyond many online attention spans. In the end, I chose 15 photos.

Whittling down over 2200 photos of nearly 100 performances isn't an easy task. About half a dozen of them I already knew would be in the list. Others I had in mind didn't make the cut after I really took a look at them again. This is because of two things: First, as I looked at some after the jaws of time had gnawed at my memory, they were not quite the photos I recollected them being. This same phenomenon contributed to finding photos I had not given much thought to months ago grabbed my attention as I reviewed them for this list.

That's how our minds work, our memories can be different from the real event. We remember what is either the easiest or the hardest part of the event for us to deal with. Or we remember in concert with something else related to what we saw and experienced. The tragic beauty of photography is that the image never changes: it's pretty objective compared to human memory. The results can be shocking as we compare our memories to photos.

That's human nature, and it's a frighteningly glorious thing. Memory is fluid, dynamic, fragile, and often deceptive. They are meant to fade to some degree, perhaps to spare us the burden of remembering too much that was painful, or regretting too much the passing of what was good.

So here are my Top 15 Favorite Performance Photos of 2013...for now. I would probably choose a few different ones were I to do this next week.

Mike Mangion of Mike Mangione and the Union