Then there are the inevitable photographs.
These items, even when placed right beside a busy highway, are supposed to provide the right romantic atmosphere, and a backdrop for the inevitable photographs and videos.
The inevitable signed photographs documenting a Clinton visit — at Hilltop Wines and Spirits, at Town and Country Cleaners — are the least of it, though the photo of Mr. Clinton with the entire kitchen staff at the Kabab Station was a big enough hit that many of the workers immediately got on their cellphones and called India.
It might be argued that there is inevitable manipulation with most photographs.
Maybe it was inevitable, then, that nascent photographs, literally written in light, flickered between science and superstition, defying our sense of the tangible.
For the series, Chalmers placed a predator beside its prey and photographed the inevitable: a caterpillar nibbling its way through a tomato, a praying mantis slaying a caterpillar, and a toad eating a praying mantis.
Were Warhol's choices of subject matter — soup cans, Marilyn, car crashes, Jackie in mourning, a cruddy little photograph of flowers — inevitable?
And soon Mr. Craig released the inevitable counterimages, a happy family photograph of a smiling Elian in his father's arms, along with Mr. Gonzalez's wife and their infant son.
As soon as the photographs of the inevitable collateral damage emerge, Americans who are now being implored to enter Syria to tip the scale against the Assad regime will reap the resentments of the families and clans of those we kill.
Because he was a true improviser, Claxton's photographs look lucky and inevitable in equal measure.
