On August 10, 1973, in a small Utah town, a man ordered pancakes. He never ate them warm. Fifty years later, that breakfast hangs in MoMA.

This week I sit with one single photograph: Breakfast, Trail's End Restaurant, Kanab, Utah, August 10, 1973. A short stack of pancakes, half a cantaloupe, a glass of milk, seen straight down from above, before the first bite. No people. No event. And yet you can look at it for a very long time and it doesn't run out.

The story behind it is the episode. Shore came back to a restaurant he'd shot the year before with a pocket camera, but this time he was carrying a 4x5 view camera. He stood on a chair, aimed a machine the size of a suitcase at his own untouched breakfast, and by the time he took the picture the food was cold. Everyone else in that room got a warm breakfast. He got a photograp ...