everything in the world could be made interesting through the camera." If it is "not altogether wrong to say that there is no such thing as a bad photograph -- only less interesting [ones]," the reason why photography becomes "one of the chief means for producing that quality ascribed to things and situations which erases these distinctions" is because "the photographic purchase on the world, with its limitless production of notes on reality," makes everything comparable to others of its same kind or type. We can thus glimpse the connection between late twentieth-century conceptualism -- famously obsessed with acts of documentation, classification, and the presentation of evidence -- and a range of realist practices from the previous century. Indeed, conceptual art's "crucial innovation," as Liz Kotz suggests, was its unprecedented pairing of photography with the language of ordinary/everyday observation: the "notes on reality," and on social types in particular, central also to novelists ranging from Henry James to Georges Perec. As James famously said, "The only obligation to which in advance we may hold a novel, without incurring the accusation of being arbitrary, is that it be interesting." You describe the interesting as a "specifically modern response to novelty and change." Could you say more about the way in which you think the interesting is a peculiarly historicized affect? The interesting, like the picturesque, was conceived as an aesthetic explicitly about variation, eclecticism, and idiosyncrasy -- as if in unconscious response to the unprecedented proliferation of styles characterizing the late