In thinking about the use of captions I realize that I had forgotten an early influence on my photography, which affected me before I left for Mexico in 1953 -- Wright Morris' book The Inhabitants (1946). Morris was a novelist first, a photographer second, but a good one. On a fellowship he traveled in 1940 the depression-broken Midwest, shooting abandoned homes and farmsteads, and in his book each photograph was accompanied by a full page of imagined conversation or interior monologue by the departed inhabitants.

The photographs were good. But the combination of words and picture was especially evocative. The words made me dwell on the photograph and see it better. It was an approach Morris hoped to carry on, but after a couple of such "photo-texts" (his name for them) his publisher told him there was no market for them, so he just wrote novels, for which he won awards and became famous.

Szarkowski at MOMA championed Morris' photography and gave him an exhibition there, and there was a retrospective of his photography at SF MOMA in 1996, I believe. I received one of his original 8 by 10 prints from the anthropologist Dorothy Lee, who knew him, in the early sixties but never again saw The Inhabitants until my daughter gave me a copy 2004. Clearly this, along with The Family of Man, were major influences on my views of photographic art. Words were always involved.