It was California weather in Texas, and seventy five people were on dates in the park outside, pets, pizza, frisbees, blankets, and big hats. They moved the Magrittes out into the lobby for Photography and The Surreal Imagination. The exhibit took over three small galleries, sorted thematically. The first was called The Body, the second The Image, and the third was The Everyday. The walls were blue-gray. In The Image, a large winged ant crawled diagonally downward across a framed photograph. I stood there with my open notebook in my hands.

The security guard mistook my watching the bug for a very close examination of the picture and asked if I was a photographer.

“Yes,” I said.

“Man Ray is over there. Enjoy—this exhibit is on loan.”

“Oh really?”

“It’s a temporary exhibit—enjoy.”

I thanked him and stepped obligingly toward the Man Ray as I tallied the number of security guards in my book.

“You can take pictures of the labels,” he said.

“But not the work.”

“When I’m not looking.”

I laughed and thanked him again.

“Most are loaned by the artists or somebody.”

“I see.”

“Enjoy.”

Smiling, I thanked him and moved into The Everyday. Atget and others. Since leaving college I have missed being surrounded by people who care deeply about photography, who want to see it pushed to its wondrous best. Going to look at art never parallels the experience of sitting in a dark room and arguing with people you love. But The Everyday got me close. Seeing Lisette Model and Cartier-Bresson in the context of The Surreal Imagination validated some old recurrent feelings of mine around how photography always harbors a massive, fundamental, strangeness. All the pleasures that can be found swirling around inside a constructed image are also intrinsic to nature. The preverbal impulse to record an image knows no restraints. There are so many reasons to keep our parameters broad.

I thought up a show called Surrealism and the Photographic Imagination and closed in on the last picture in the exhibition, which was Diane Arbus’s famous boy with a grenade. He’s always wearing that frustrated grimace; he was staring me straight in the face. In this context his one empty claw stretched to its limits in an attempt to grasp my take on the show. Outside, a clean dog chased a squirrel up a fig tree.