Materially, the Silents were on much closer terms with agricultural realities, as well as manufacturing ones. Silents often know how things are made. As children, they were left to wander through the wastes and scrapheaps of the post-war moment. To this day, they inspect food and mechanical objects differently. Many of the most celebrated Boomer pop figures are in fact Silents – Bob Dylan, the Beatles, Patti Smith, Leonard Cohen, Joan Baez – as if the consumption craze of the later generation had to be supplied by a cohort of indefatigable harvesters. Tonally, the Silents are distinguished by their assurance and will toward objectivity, as well as their talent for hammering at fundamentals. It is difficult to imagine an author of a different generation writing about photography like Susan Sontag, who takes to the task like Aristotle, first taking care to tell how it differs from painting, etc. The Silents at their best are simultaneously vernacular and oracular, with a weakness for loftiness. You can feel the decisiveness of the typewriter in their prose, the balm of the cigarette.