I like reading about photographs almost as much as looking at them, and though there is a considerable body of great criticism in print, there's also a lot that has gone missing.

Case in point: Tod Papageorge's Walker Evans and Robert Frank: An Essay on Influence, which was apparently the catalog for a 1981 show Papageorge curated at Yale, where he's run the graduate photography program for years. I'd never heard about this show or book until last week, when Time critic Richard Lacayo mentioned it, calling it "one of the most illuminating books about photography I ever read."

I could buy a copy of Papageorge's book via Amazon or Alibris, but the cheapest price I found is $195.06. I don't want to collect a first edition, I just want to read the essay. A PDF would be fine.

This seems like a perfect opportunity for some innovative web publisher to work the Long Tail, not only for Papageorge's essay but any number of essays and introductions from out-of-print books and show catalogues that warrant being re-introduced to the photographic conversation. Paging Tim O'Reilly!

As long as I'm playing Lazy Web here, I want to add a Lazy Publishing request: Would someone (Aperture, are you listening?) please publish The Collected Introductions of John Szarkowski, a compilation of the essays he wrote for photographers' books.