My photo blog is now a year old. I am always thinking about my photography and my blog has been a way to share this in a totally democratic venue. In an interview with Alec Soth about the blog world in Conscientioushttp://www.jmcolberg.com/weblog/archives/002402.html#002402 Alec Soth calls the art world Exclusive but the blog world Inclusive. He says this as a member of the Art World and as someone who started a blog. This inclusive nature does make the blog world ubiquitous and vulgar but it can be a way of entering the 'Artistic Conversation' even if you may only be talking to yourself. When I returned to taking and making pictures again my goal was to have a show of my work as if the Art world had just been waiting for the last 30 years for me to do something with my photography. In my initial forays into the Art World I was invisible and that's okay now. I have come to realize that I really do not have the time, the energy, the constitution, the skill, or the attitude to get noticed. I've come to accept and even enjoy anonymity. It's safer and less humiliating. I have a friend who is a very accomplished print artist and I knew her for quite sometime before she revealed to me that she even was an artist. She says that there is no prestige in being an artist unless you consider it prestigious to lie down and invite people to come up and kick you. My good friend up in Tacoma is a painter and even graduated from Rhode Island School of Design and he has come up against this wall of indifference for over 20 years. I have no reason to complain or be bitter. To create is a joyful experience and as important as Prozac to the creative personality ,which talent or no, I was born with and I need to express. So in the spirit of 4th of July wherein I celebrate Thoreau moving to Walden to declare his independence from the Industrial tyranny of 19th century man, I declare my independence from giving a rip about what the established Order thinks of my photographs. This is my manifesto and a birthday card to my blog. Tom Rutter, July 3rd, 2007.