But too often Hitler merely provides a lens for looking at the problem of celebrity.
ALL Shawn McCully wanted was a lens for his digital single-lens reflex camera.
Oh, and you'll need to buy a lens for it as well.
No city has been adored through a lens for so many years or is as steeped in photographic history.
"They'll get basic materials like plain water to use as a lens for a microscope," said Marcia Rudy, the museum's director of public programs.
They've come up with a novel home crafts project: turning that old Monkees' Greatest Hits album into a lens for an X-ray microscope.
"I find it interesting to use as a lens for what's going on in the borough," said Mr. Rosenfeld, a book publisher.
"But more seriously, it was a way of using their sensibilities as a lens for me, to see where I live.
"The best comparison for Seed," wrote a media critic, "is the early years of Rolling Stone, when music was less a subject than a lens for viewing culture".
In the early 1900s, the city was a lens for understanding larger processes – but half a century later, it had lost that role.
While this was going on, people were constantly dropping into the office with drawings, models, letters, cables, and various props, such as a model of a lens for one of the telescopes in a spaceship.
