ABSTRACT
(First Published in Creative Camera, October 1988)
This piece was written by way of reviewing Richard Powers’ Three Farmers on their Way to a Dance, a novel taking its title from that of a famous photograph by August Sander. It is a photograph with a singularly acute relation to the imaginary; Powers builds a novel around it, and Wim Wenders’ fleeting use of it in Wings of Desire marks its mute eloquence, the stories it might speak. Of course, Sander’s title is itself a beginning, a prompt to a fiction.
