“If I could do it, I’d do no writing at all here. It would be photographs; the rest would be fragments of cloth, bits of cotton, lumps of earth, records of speech, pieces of wood and iron, phials of odors, plates of food, and of excrement. Booksellers would consider it quite a novelty; critics would murmur, yes, but is it art; and I could trust a majority of you to use it as you would a parlor game.
A piece of the body torn out by the roots might be more to the point.
As it is, though, I’ll do what little I can in writing. Only it will be very little. I’m not capable of it; and if I were, you would not go near it at all. For if you did, you would hardly bear to live.
As a matter of fact, nothing I might write could make any difference whatever.”
–James Agee, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men
And while, like Agee, “nothing I write could make any difference whatever”, in addition to photographing a few brief moments of the campus movement, I have tried my best to write an answer to the question What was the UW Encampment Protest?