Broken shell

Broken shell
by
Tony Karp

Some have questioned why the shells I photograph are broken or imperfect, and some have commented that they have better shells. Perfect shells are easy to find. There are hundreds of shops that sell them, and they aren't very expensive to acquire.

So why the broken shells? I believe that shells are like people. The imperfections add character. Where there is a hole in the shell, you can look into its interior and see another universe. You can see where the creature that inhabited the shell actually lived. And you can see what happened to the shell after its owner abandoned it. (Many of those beautiful shells that you see in the stores had living creatures in them when they were "harvested" to sell to the tourists.)

This is a newer version of one of the pictures in an earlier exhibit, made with better equipment, software, and experience. And, thanks to the falling price of online storage, it has a higher resolution along with a larger file size. Like the earlier version, it was made on a simple, inexpensive flatbed scanner.

Like the original, it is a tribute to the work of Edward Weston and Georgia O'Keeffe.