Congratulations to Bill Miles of Richardson and David Kozlowski of Keller, whose photos were chosen as our Flickr Photos of the Year!

David submitted his photo, titled The Crumbling, Broken Economy, back in February when the subject was really on everyone’s lips. It was chosen by Art&Seek users by a wide margin, capturing more than 50 percent of your votes. Here’s what he said about the image when he sent it to us:

“I was out getting lost of the backroads of North Texas one day and decided to take a turn off the main road to visit the square in Collinsville. I noticed an old, decaying neon sign on a brick wall of the Economy Drug Store. With the wall crumbling, and the paint fading on the word ‘economy,’ it struck me as a symbol of the economic crisis happening right now.”

We also asked SMU photography professor Debora Hunter to take a look at your photos from the past 12 months and pick the one she thought was the best. Her choice was Bill’s photo, titled Sky Scraper, which he sent us in August. Here’s what Prof. Hunter had to say about it:

“In an age when so many of us have sophisticated cameras and post production (Adobe Photoshop) capabilities, I was drawn to this image of innocence and seemingly low technical intervention. Here is a kind of delightful snapshot naivety, reminiscent of Henri Jacque Lartigue’s motion studies of his zany French family around 1911.

The figure seems to be a young girl, perhaps 10 or 11 years old, wonderfully caught split seconds before her tippy toes leave the pavement and she flings herself wildly backward into the water. Certainly not with perfect Olympian diving form, her arched back and flaying arms convey a child’s exuberance and abandonment. The mystery is that little translucent flowered flounce of a skirt. Did she not come prepared with a proper bathing suit? Could this be an unplanned spontaneous plunge made in normal play clothes? All the better for fun. And where is this place – not a residential aquamarine swimming pool? A state park or municipal pool – but then, where are the other swimmers? And what weather is this for a swim with a greenish, overcast, ominous sky with dark shadowing water, roughed up by the wind? All of this goes far in creating a mood or urging us to call up our own memories.

Though seemingly unplanned, there are formal elements making the image strong. A titled horizon adds energy. The silhouetted figure creates a strong curvilinear shape against a simple background. The sky’s vignetting adds closure to the frame and draws our eye back to the arching body in its suspended moment in time. The red on the dancing flounce creates a focal point in a composition of the blue and green.

A simple shot with mythic associations!”

These two photos were the best out of more than 2,000 submitted since we started the contest in October 2008. If you keep creating these lasting images, we’ll keep posting them here every week.