When I arrived home I went to the telephone and called up a friend of mine who is a photographer and accessible to the strange energies of the Twentieth Century.  It was almost one o'clock in the morning. I had awakened him and his voice was a refugee from sleep.

"Who is it?" he said.

"Christmas trees," I said.

"What?"

"Christmas trees."

"Is that you, Richard?" he asked.

"Yeah."

"What about them?"

"Christmas is only skin deep," I said.  "Why don't we take hundreds of pictures of Christmas trees that are abandoned in the streets?  We'll show the despair and abandonment of Christmas by the way people throw their trees out."

"Might as well do that as anything else," he said.  "I'll start tomorrow during my lunch hour."

"I want you to photograph them just like dead soldiers," I said.  "Don't touch or pose them.  Just photograph them the way they fell."

Richard Brautigan, American novelist and poet, an excerpt from
"What Are You Going to Do with 390 Photographs of Christmas Trees?"