Excepted from A Conversation with Kai-Olaf Hesse posted by the esteemed Jörg Colberg.

"For example, take Joel Sternfeld's burning pumpkin stand (on the cover of American Prospects, photographs which I really love!), take the irony of the situation away, and you have a "deadpan" photograph in terms of the internal organization of the image. On the other hand, if you happened to come across the scene in real life, you wouldn't need a photograph to “get” it. Compare this with, say, Lewis Baltz' "New Industrial Parks Near Irvine, California". If you don't take such a photo, no one would look at, much less think of what happens there... know what I mean?"

This seems to present a very interesting and pertinent divide between two kinds of photographic images: on one side are the images made from situations which if encountered in real life would cause all those witnessing it to whip out their cell phone cameras, and on the other are those, shall we call them, mundane images that often rely more heavily on context and/or theoretical underpinnings.

Of course there are all manner of images that do not fit comfortably in either of these categories, but such nuances are too much for me at this point in the evening. Night night.