To illustrate a point in conversation, I often grab my iPhone, tap in a descriptor and choose “Image”. In a flash, images on my screen include the object of my curiosity. How what I’m looking for is displayed, in a neatly tiled collection with its own internal order, is its own delight. I'm a born collector, and the digital universe accommodates excess beautifully. I can make photographs profligately—without regard for the expenses of wet photography. Making a digital image, its review and storage are nearly free. At last, I can collect images with abandon.

Sometimes, the array called up by my image searches is richer than any flea market’s variety and juxtaposition. Gathered together, these images can energize each other by their contrasting proximity. Photographers are especially attracted to recording surprises, the off-beat, the desultory. The collections of images on these pages are the result of my curiosity and editing. If I hadn’t recorded these marvelous collections, they would be just so much other lost ephemera of our time. I had to act, to say, “Hold on a moment more”, and to hit “Save”.

These images are about patterns of ideas—graphic patterns, popular patterns of preference and a pattern of censorship in the images we in the United States are allowed to see. Each collection is a response by Google Images to a search command by me. The collections may be visual homographs—different images that derive from the same word, eg., “rod” could be a fishing rod, a hot rod, a stick, a gun or a man named Rod, as in Stewart or Serling. Some collections are of different iterations of the same thing: of a painting or animal.

I am fascinated by the interrelationships of the separate images: the series and sequences produced seemingly, but not really, at random. The preference pattern is an instant poll of the users in the Internet universe as to what images they select most at that moment. The results reflect the most-favored image at the top