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Early on in September, my roommate stumbled upon an advertisement for the Paristown Flea Market, which would be taking place the next day. According to the ad, the event would feature dozens of booths from local small businesses, with products ranging from clothing to antiques to furniture to vegetables. My roommates and I being generally fond of these things, it didn’t take long before we were resolving to wake up early the next morning so that we would have a chance to shop around the market before it got too crowded.
We stuck to that plan, and though I didn’t end up buying much, I did walk out with a few old LIFE magazines. They only cost $1, and since both cover stories related in some way to events that I was talking about in my classes at the time, I had decided to purchase them on something of a whim. While looking through them later, entertaining some vague notion about maybe cutting out some of the pictures to decorate my then-barren walls, I ran across the letters to the editor section.
I spent a few minutes reading through readers’ thoughts about foreign policy, domestic atrocities, and ad placement, but I was particularly struck by one subsection, whose letters were inspired by the results of an apparently very inflammatory photography contest. To offer a few examples:
“Sirs: The LIFE Library of Photography clearly explains that photography is an original art form that should not attempt to imitate painting. Maybe you didn’t read it; you awarded prizes in your photography contest to photographic versions of Homer, Ingres, Harnett, Whistler, Wyeth, and Clyfford Still.”
“Sirs: …Your cover picture was nice to look at but is it really a photograph? I suppose you also might have accepted five photographs of gulls taken at the city dump superimposed over a photograph of an oar in the local sporting goods store superimposed over a picture of some fisherman from Australia superimposed over a picture of the surf at Cape Town superimposed over a picture of some Kansas clouds as a photograph.
Oh, come on now, LIFE, such things are not photographs, they are sandwiches.”
And perhaps my favorite one:
“Sirs: Here is the surefire grand-prizer for your next contest…” The author of the letter then attached a small black and white photograph of a sandwich he had made himself.
Well, as you could imagine, reading this made me very curious to see the much-abhorred contest winner. Luckily, college has made me very aware of all the ways in which to research something, and so I headed over to Google Books, which happens to contain LIFE Magazine archives dating back several decades. I did find the photo (see below), and discovered it was taken by a then-60 year old dentist, Dr. William M. Johannes. According to the magazine, Dr. Johannes created his image by layering a picture of a dandelion over the sunset. Though Dr. Johannes probably didn’t anticipate (or appreciate) his image becoming the source of such discontent, I suppose it did end up helping his photo in the long run. After all, I would’ve never (nor, I’m assuming, would any of you have) seen his picture, several decades later, without those letters to the editor.