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| Alfred Eisenstaedt Royal Palace, Stockholm 1937 gelatin silver print Phillips Collection, Washington DC |
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| Alfred Eisenstaedt Thomas Hart Benton with Model for Persephone 1938 gelatin silver print Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, Missouri |
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| George Platt Lynes Endymion and Selene ca. 1937-39 gelatin silver print Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, Missouri |
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| George Platt Lynes Nude with Wire Chair 1939 gelatin silver print Indianapolis Museum of Art |
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| PaJaMa (Paul Cadmus, Jared French, Margaret French) Portrait of Paul Cadmus 1938 gelatin silver print Phillips Collection, Washington DC |
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| Ruth Bernhard Buddha Doll 1938 gelatin silver print Milwaukee Art Museum |
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| Edward Steichen Clare Booth Luce ca. 1938 dye transfer print Victoria & Albert Museum, London |
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| Walker Evans Subway Passengers, New York City 1938 gelatin silver print Milwaukee Art Museum |
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| Walker Evans Subway Portrait ca. 1938 gelatin silver print Milwaukee Art Museum |
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| Edward Weston MGM Storage Lot 1939 gelatin silver print Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, Missouri |
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| Helen Levitt New York ca. 1939 gelatin silver print Milwaukee Art Museum |
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| Minor White Gino Cippola, Portland 1939 gelatin silver print Minneapolis Institute of Art |
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| Adolf Fassbender On High 1939-40 gelatin silver print Minneapolis Institute of Art |
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| Harold Edgerton Bob Edgerton Running ca. 1939-40 gelatin silver print Chrysler Museum of Art, Norfolk, Virginia |
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| Harold Edgerton Pete Desjardin Diving 1940 gelatin silver print Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, Missouri |
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| Günther Krampf Fashion Model in Trenchcoat ca. 1940 gelatin silver print Getty Museum, Los Angeles |
from What Are You On?
If you asked an Elizabethan
What are you on?
he or she would have answered
The earth, this terrestrial globe
whereas today it means
What medication
are you taking?
(Are you taking has less energy
than What medication it is an anticlimax
without a climax)
And today What are you on about?
would have sounded like
What are you of thereabouts in?
and will
So what medications are
you on?
I am taking italics it pokes
a hole in whatever is going to be
so I can slip through
and not have arms and legs all the time
You've lost me and I'm not even an Elizabethan
That's O.K. neither am I though both
of us bestride this terrestrial globe
and fain would lie down
for the earth is a medication a giant pill
we ride on
like the aspirin in the poem I wrote in 1966
and didn't understand until last night or was it this morning
A.M. and P.M. are medications
I take one in the morning and one in the evening
Some day people will look back
at the twentieth century and think
How backward they were
the way some look back now
at tribal societies and say
But primitive life was so dirty how
could you keep things clean?
not knowing that tribal people
lived in the Garden of Eden
comparatively speaking
That is they had more humanity
than later people
who traded theirs for technology
so that those people who look back at Earth
some day from a distant galaxy
will not be people at all
comparatively speaking
they will be cue balls
– Ron Padgett (from Collected Poems, 2013)