One thing I've been thinking this week is that at some level (unconscious, subconscious) I've always thought of joy as being a strong emotion, stronger, or maybe deeper, than happiness, delight, well-being, success but that doesn't seem to be the accepted definition. When I first thought about joy for this assignment, my reaction was 'Wow, joy is pretty special [thinking strong] feeling that I don't achieve very often. How will I think of things to photograph? They'll have to be very special photographs.' After thinking about the accepted definition of joy, I've adjusted my personal definition of it a bit. But I am still troubled by the question of if someone else looks at the picture, how can they tell that it represents a source of joy to me if I don't tell them?

Despite my wonderful "Questions to reflect on" from my earlier post, I've been more focused on the definition of joy this week. And I keep meaning to look it up in the OED at work and just haven't gotten around to it. But I have been thinking about the definitions I've already found. The MW describes it variously as an emotion, a state of being (what's the difference?), and/or the cause or source of the emotion or state of being. Under those rules, my last post about my cats makes them the source of my emotion. Ok, I can work with that but it leads to wonder:

do cats feel joy (or emotions of any kind?) I think they do. Even though I anthropomorphize them often (more than I should I suspect), I think that purring is one way that they communicate joy (particularly in the sense of well-being).

if cats do feel joy, what is the source of their joy? I'd like to think I was but I do wonder whether anyone with a warm lap and a soft touch behind their ears would give them equal joy (once the cats got used to them). This lead me to

can a picture of my cats (a representation of the source of my joy) also be a source of joy for me? the same source?
Maybe that's why we consider some photographs art and some not (or less so). The good, artistic photographs are the ones that either (a) evoke an emotion, joy for instance, in the viewer and/or (b) communicate the photographer's joy.