I was preparing to take a photograph of some attractive buildings in a French village when a little girl popped out of her doorway and asked: “Why are you doing that?” in excellent French, considering how young she was. I had no ready answer, in that or any other language, but it was an interesting question. Why was I doing that? She may not have understood that I was simply taking a picture. My big, old, black camera looks more like a death ray machine than the colorful toy-like cameras she grew up with. But either way she had, like any child, gone straight to the heart of the matter. Why do we photograph perfectly ordinary places and things? Before photography came along artists would sketch and paint the scenes they saw on their travels to show to people who had never been there. But now everybody has been there, and taken their own pictures, and there are billions more pictures in books and on the web, so what’s the point? I could claim, but I won’t, that I was photographing this