Prior (and sometimes, still), I hold an image to be a document of a moment. A sense of capturing the otherwise moving world in a singular, sweeping moment that remains stable and sound throughout the rest of time, unlike everything else in the world.
My high school photography professor, whose class changed my life and its trajectory (I'm sure I would have faired well in those quantum mechanics classes I was just dying to take), often scoffed and corrected us whenever we said, "picture." Photography was/is never a picture, but it is/was always a photo. An image. There were a myriad of alternatives to the cursed word, but these two stuck the closest, and appeared the most in my weekly required seven pages of research. An image.
I've taken the time to analyze "what is art" in my few years of dancing with art-making, but never, really, what an image constituted. But, I feel that they are different. An image may not necessarily be art, just as art doesn't have to be an image.
My connotation of image does not stray far from photography, my medium of choice, so it makes sense my definition of 'image' is fundamentally rooted in photography, which makes it excited (albeit a bit nervous) to read others' answers to this week's prompt.
But, in total, 'my' images mean something. They connote a feeling or evoke an emotion, stir a memory, tap a chord – there's something about an image, very much like art, that is able to produce an external response, yet still foster a sense of familiarity between the image and its viewer, to an extent that other forms of art might not be able to do.
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