an old guy in a cheap room
with a photograph of M. Monroe.
there is a loneliness in this world so great
that you can see it in the slow movement of
the hands of a clock 

 Recently I did a picture—I’ve had this experience before—and I made rough prints of a number of them. There was something wrong in all of them. I felt I’d sort of missed it and I figured I’d go back. But there was one that was just totally peculiar. It was a terrible dodo of a picture. It looks to me a little as if the lady’s husband took it. It’s terribly head-on and sort of ugly and there’s something terrific about it. I’ve gotten to like it better and better and now I’m secretly sort of nutty about it. 

 I think we have another Pulitzer here. (On his his first viewing of Nick Ut’s photograph of Kim Phuc fleeing the village of Trang Bang, Vietnam after it was napalm bombed in 1972.) 

 People are competing to win at a game that is a loser’s game. The game is to have better routine images than someone else’s routine images. If you want a prescription for routine images, you just have to go through any student’s portfolio. 

 Has photography gone too far? It would be cowardly to answer the question I have posed with a time-worn and evasive “Yes and no,” just as it would be flippant to answer it with “Who cares?” and ignorant to reply “I do not know.” I think there can be no question but that photography has gone too far, but I feel confident that it can get back, if it wants to. In that phrase “if it wants to” which I have italicized, there might seem to be a certain ominous significance, but as a matter of fact there isn’t at all; I italicized it simply because I wanted to sharpen the interest of my readers, if any are still sticking with me. The whole subject of photography has to be italicized for the average reader or he will turn to some other subject quicker than you can say “Alfred Stieglitz.”

Several years ago I remember going to an exhibition of photographs in the modern manner. Most of the pictures were highly artistic. There were photographs of balls of twine, of shadows cast by the Sixth Avenue “L,” of a lady’s hand holding some eggshells and rubies, of a horse’s mouth taken from the ground just in front of the horse by a photographer who was laying on his back (it was a gentle old horse), of a girl laying on her back as seen through a champagne glass, etc. It was difficult for me, an amateur, to know what to say about many of the pictures, especially the one of the horse’s mouth, because you could see his teeth and the picture looked at first like a balloon landing in a cemetery. So I didn’t say anything.

This kind of photography started, I believe, in fairly recent years. Somebody, maybe Man Ray (I never go into any subject thoroughly enough to know much about it), first began to take pictures of such groupings as a litter of tenpenny nails, a white door-knob, an elk’s tooth, and a strip of silk torn from a gentleman’s dressing gown. Thus one picture led to another until now there are several hundred million photographs of this nature, no two of them exactly alike but thousands of them seeming to be exactly alike. Any given object, whether animal, vegetable, or mineral, has been photographed in juxtaposition to every other known object. I have seen photographs of sparkplugs lying next to hairpins; a chipmunk’s skull with bachelor’s-button for eyes; a woman’s hand holding the sawed off part of a double-barreled shotgun; a silk hat in which several eggbeaters and a whiskbroom had been tastefully arranged; and a Bengal tiger studying with mild alarm a plate of buttons from a naval officer’s mess jacket.

Personally, I don’t care how many strange photographs are taken and exhibited. All that worries me is what is going to happen to me. I like to be photographed, and I come from a long line of ancestors who liked to be photographed. My Grandfather Fisher liked to be photographed so well that we have one old Fisher family album in which there is nothing but photographs of my grandfather. In not one of them, however, is he shown lying on his back with a dahlia in his mouth. 

 The accidents of millions of amateurs devoid of a picture vocabulary—which produced an outpouring of multiple exposures, distortions, unusual perspectives, foreshortening of planes, imbalance—has contributed greatly to the visual vocabulary of all media since before the turn of the century. 

 I struggle against photography. I struggle against the fact that it is silent, that it is just a piece of paper on the wall, often presented in a tedious white matt frame. 

 I was living in Monterey, a place where the classic photographers—the Westons, Wynn Bullock and Ansel Adams—came for a privileged view of nature. But my daily life very rarely took me to Point Lobos or Yosemite; it took me to shopping centers, and gas stations and all the other unhealthy growth that flourished beside the highway. It was a landscape that no one else had much interest in looking at. Other than me.