Happy New Year everyone! Couples, young and old, have kissed and toasted the New Year at celebrations all around the world, and we find ourselves at the dawn of a new year.

I have been scouring the “Year in Pictures series for 2014” and found lots of spectacular and gorgeous images, just not too much that was positive and uplifting.  I mean if the best that we can do are sports images, we are in serious trouble! However the New Year is meant to represent a fresh start, a blank slate upon which shall be recorded the events of the coming year.  So, let’s at least try to be optimistic.  The future, after all, is really up to us. So let’s dig deep into the wellspring of our common humanity.

In the end what struck me as closest to my feelings this January 1, 2015 about where we are today, at this precise moment in time, is a remarkable image by Marco Secchi for Getty images showing a visitor walking inside the installation by Doug Wheeler at a preview of the new exhibition last April, The Illusion of Light, at the Palazzo Grassi in Venice. For me the photograph emphasizes that photographically, intellectually, and in terms of experience the New Year is indeed a tabula rasa. By this time next year the whiteness will be filled vividly with another set of images expressing the common experiences of mankind.  And perhaps we may find hope in the fact that the only reason that photography works is because we are all connected.