Sometimes people ask me how my father got a photograph, particularly “The Loneliest Job in the World,” a photograph of President John F. Kennedy silhouetted by a window in the Oval Office. They want to know if my father composed the photograph in his mind first, and then asked the president to lean on the table. This is what my father said: He watched the president and saw that, because of the president’s injured back, the president often went to the table at the window to read. My father waited, and when Kennedy moved toward the window and the table, he positioned himself with several cameras set at different exposures. He said he had seen an image in his mind and knew that underexposing the film would create more than a picture of the president. He took several frames from slightly different angles.

The photograph was part of a series that accompanied an article in the New York Times Magazine, where my father was chief photographer for the Washington bureau. When my father showed the president a mock-up of the magazine before it came out in the Sunday paper, the president looked at the photographs, pointed to the silhouette, and said, “That’s the picture that should have been on the cover.” Both the photographer and subject sensed its importance. They both knew the picture wasn’t of a particular man leaning on a table. It’s a picture of the president, standing in silhouette, seemingly deep in thought and carrying the weight of the world on his shoulders. The picture holds within it something more than what is seen.

When my father said he made photographs rather than took them, maybe that’s what he meant. Anyone can squeeze the button on a shutter, as he liked to say. Back in 1961 when my father made that photograph, the image moved through a lens onto a piece of paper embedded with chemicals. That’s it.

Maybe my father was prescient. Maybe JFK was, too. After the assassination, the photograph became famous. It was a symbol of the Kennedy presidency, the lost hope of a generation, Camelot. In some ways the photograph gave us solace, as if we saw in the president’s posture an acceptance of his destiny.

Later, the picture seemed to hold within it the cumulative losses of the Kennedy family.

Now the image has been appropriated by anyone who wants to be seen struggling alone against uncertain odds, even if they aren’t real. There was a three-second shot of Martin Sheen silhouetted against a window at the opening to the “West Wing” television show.

I remember my father once being angry when a photograph was disqualified from a competition because the judges thought it had been manipulated. It was a picture of a NASA rocket ready for launch. The photograph was taken at night, a full moon burned iridescent. The judges thought the moon looked too perfect, too round, too much the size of a quarter that could have been placed on the photograph during developing. My father shrugged off the criticism; to him the allegation said more about the judges than it did about his photography. That wasn’t how he made pictures.

Yet my father wasn’t above creating, or re-creating, a scene. Everyone in the family was called upon at some time to act as a model. My younger brother and I often went on assignment with him and were photographed walking through the National Zoo for a shot of the new bird exhibit and looking through a wall-size window at the Smithsonian. On a cold, icy morning, my father saw two schoolchildren on hands and knees pushing their books up the steep hill in front of our house. Within an hour my brother and I were doing the same. It made the next day’s paper.

My oldest sister is the widow in “Widow’s Walk,” a winter snow scene at Arlington Cemetery, although she was neither a widow nor the wife of a soldier. She was a high-schooler, called on by our father to walk among the white gravestones at a prescribed angle after a deep winter snow. I have a memory of sitting in the car waiting for her to walk, then walk again, until my father was satisfied he had captured on film the image he sought. I was bored. She was cold.

The photograph was made in 1968. “Widow’s Walk” had nothing to do with the Vietnam War, but it evoked the nation’s growing discomfort with the war and the daily death count. Today, the photograph transcends any specific reference to a time, or even a place. It speaks to all loss.

My father wasn’t on assignment when he made “Widow’s Walk.” He loved photographing Washington, particularly in the snow when the city’s granite and marble buildings took on an ethereal quality. Washington, to my father, was as close to an earthly approximation of Mount Olympus as there was. Draped in fresh snow, it was as if the city sat atop pure white clouds. Every winter he tried to photograph what he felt in his heart.

When my father started work as a photographer in the early 1940s, photojournalism was in its infancy. In fact, photographers’ work was seen more as craft and certainly not on the same level as the writers in the newsroom. But my father helped create a different aesthetic. Photojournalism became as important to the story as the story itself. Even today when video of an event shows up on the Internet in real time, it is the photograph we look to for meaning, that we search for some hint of the truth as if we are holding in our hands the actual moment in miniature.

Did he take photographs or make photographs? I’m still not sure what my father meant, if he was simply saying, for those who still didn’t believe, that photography was more than craft? Or was he making a joke, something for which he was very well known? Was he confirming or contradicting Sontag?

Maybe I do understand. For my father, whether he changed the lighting, moved a piece of furniture, or stood in the shadows and waited for a scene to unfold in front of him, when he took a photograph he become a part of it and in that instant it changed from something he took to something he made.

By the way, the morning my father made the picture of JFK at the window, the president was reading the Times. He had gotten to the editorial page. My father said, “He looked over and he saw me. He hadn’t been aware that I took that picture from the back, but he saw me when I moved to the side there. He glanced over at me, and he said:’‘I wonder where Mr. Krock gets all the crap he puts in this horseshit column of his.’ Apparently he was much upset about Mr. Krock’s column that day.”

(The previous owner was not the sort of man to sell, move and forget. Even now, all these months later, he still sends the occasional e-mail: “The first frost is coming! Time to cover those magnolia trees!”)

Of course, as soon as he told me to steer clear of the hill, my attention was drawn there. It was as if the land itself carried my thoughts to this wild annex, the way, in certain Edward Hopper paintings, “Cape Cod Morning, 1950,” say, your eye is carried away from the main action (a woman looking out a bay window) to the darkness under the trees; or the way, in the Hemingway story “Big Two-Hearted River,” the attention of the narrator is drawn away from the comfortable stretch of river to the swamp where “in the fast deep water, in the half light, the fishing would be tragic.”

I’ve always been drawn to wild places. What’s more, as the rest of the land had been landscaped, shaped, done in finery, the wild hill was, as the surfers of Sheboygan, Wis., used to say — I’ve spent many summers with them, waiting for a storm — the only place I could “make my mark.” In my mind, the chaos of unchecked growth would be replaced by a rolling meadow, a refuge that gives itself to wild flowers and butterflies and the romantic light from the old Hank Williams tune:

The silence of a falling star
Lights up a purple sky

In the early days, when the hill was a tangle, I was mesmerized by the image of the man clearing brush. I did not like George W. Bush, but I did like those pictures of him, dressed in cowboy gear, hacking at the Texas undergrowth. My land was like a full-whiskered, jug-carrying ne’er-do-well, and I wanted to get at it with strop and strait razor, work that would connect me to the earliest work of America, the work of plowing and settlement, of Manifest Destiny. I would homestead like Shane. I would build and own and bust sod and war with the ranchers, whose time had come and gone. I would possess the land as a man possesses a fine Philadelphia lady.

What feeds the soul of a man? I ask myself this every day, sometimes twice.

That first hard season of drenching rains, I went to work with a scythe, because that is what the gleaners use in “Anna Karenina” ( “the old man would wipe his scythe with the wet grass, rinse its blade in the clear water …”), and because that was the tool on sale at the hardware store. It was Excalibur, calling me by name,”Oh Richard, wield me, swing me like a prom date, use me to possess the land.”

(One of the great pleasures of this job was regular trips to the hardware store, and its smell, which is cooked into my earliest memories, rubber and seed, the cherry wood floors varnished to a high shine!)

I went into the field at dusk. I swung the scythe. The blade reflected the setting sun. I worked until my back ached and I was tired. It was, as David Letterman used to say, the good kind of tired. My friend Greg walked the land with me — he knows a lot about this kind of stuff — and said, “Like Goldman Sachs, you are doing God’s work.” My friend Jim, who also knows a lot, said, “Let’s go into the house and have a drink.”

Wild grape, raspberry, sumac, which, for whatever reason, always makes me think of dinosaurs and primordial ooze, many kinds of vine, the worst being the kind that makes your hands sting and smells like peanut butter and play dates — I devastated everything. The hill was full of bugs and snakes and crawly things, but I was the baddest of them all.

Between sessions, I sat in my den — it looks a lot like the Lake Tahoe office where Michael Corleone planned his campaigns — drinking whiskey and listening to the washing machine. Clicking into high spin, it sounds like a chopper. When this happened, I used to look at my hands, nicked and bloody from my battle in the field, and think,”My God, I’m back over there!”

I became obsessed with mulleins. In case you don’t know, a mullein is an evil weed that takes off like a rocket. And when I say rocket, I am not thinking of the Apollo or Gemini missions, but of that sinister dingus that launched Sputnik. The mullein arrives one day as four leaves, ugly little things that look like hairy ears. Soon after, a single spear appears. It’s a spire and it grows straight up with terrifying speed. Left alone, it will be 6 feet by August, towering above the garden like a raised middle finger, a big “F U ” to the fool who thinks he can conquer nature. Eventually, the tip of the spire is covered with tiny yellow flowers that look less like flowers than corpuscles or cells, the kind you are advised to irradiate. Mulleins indicate a wild or waste place, an abandoned field, the side yard of a house in foreclosure; a place from which people have been driven. There’s nothing sadder than a mullein by itself on a hill. Now and then, when, from the window of a train, I see a field of mulleins, I can taste the bile in my mouth.

At some point that second summer, I switched from scythe to weed whacker, and it was one of the great days of my life. The smell of gasoline, the feel when the engine turns over and the orange plastic haymakers spin, the throb that travels through your entire body. The waste trees and scrub had been cleared; I now went after all the remaining growth, wiping the hill clean as the hand wipes clean the blackboard after the last day of school.

When the hippies raced through Chicago in my babyhood, Mayor Daley, the real one, the original, asked the throng, “What trees have you planted? ” To that I say: more than a few, my friend, more than a few, this being the latest move in my battle to retake the hill. Long grasses, short glasses, perennials and trees.

I write at the end of the third summer. I write from a mind filled with Zen poetry and a body nicked and bruised. I bleed, but I am happy. The work goes on but the back of the enemy has been broken. In the evening, the blades of the long grass wave in the wind and the lark sings and fireflies linger. A treehouse has been built. It’s made of cedar, like the trunks of the Japanese trees that mark the entrance to the meadow. It’s like a sniper’s nest. If all goes to hell, I can survive there for weeks with little more than a bag of sandwiches and a piss bucket. I have, in other words, settled my own little piece of America. My son Nate has even made a flag. It looks like this:

We plan to apply for admission to the Union early next year. 

Rich Cohen is the author of “Israel Is Real,” “Sweet and Low,” “Tough Jews,” “The Avengers,” “The Record Men” and other books.

If I were a pickpocket or a purse-snatcher, I would rob me. And honestly, I’m so tired right now, if you just came up to me and asked me for my wallet with your eyebrows furrowed, I’d probably just give it to you.

Are we clear?

But, one of the cruelest tragedies of late-stage pregnancy is that not only are you fettered with a body that moves with the speed of a cruise ship easing out of its berth, you are also burdened by a relentless desire to “nest.” Requiring tools, and equipment, and physical effort and stuff.

“Nesting” can take many forms, all of which I seem to have simultaneously. Truthfully, I think it’s kind of funny and adorable, how pregnancy returns us in many subtle ways to an animal state. It’s not like I’m out scouring the park for twigs and discarded feathers to adorn the walls of my home. I’m a Waldorf-loving Earth Mom. I already have all of those things. You’re much more likely to find me heaving myself up on a teetering stepladder to fetch the spare wall paint for random wall touch-ups or deciding that now would be a great time to get my face into some Scrubbing Bubbles fumes to bleach the grout. (Sorry, fellow Earth Moms. Sometimes when a crabby pregnant lady develops a homicidal vendetta against shower mold, only the most toxic chemicals will do.)

I also make a lot of casseroles. I’m supposed to freeze them for when the baby comes so that we’ll have lots of food on hand for when no one feels like cooking. But we just eat them. After all that cooking, I’m too tired to make dinner.

One person who doesn’t find my nesting instincts charming and amusing on a primal level is my husband. He has been dispatched no less that five times in the last three weeks to build unnecessary furnishings and playthings for our growing brood, with me looking over his shoulder the whole time quietly cheerleading.

I mean, he likes building things and doing yardwork at our place upstate and all that, it just takes him a while to get there. And he only enjoys doing it on his own terms. He likes to disappear, for instance, on a hot summer day, for maybe five hours or so. When you find him, wild-eyed and shirtless, covered in clumps of sweaty mud and insect bites, you must approach him gingerly.

“What were you doing back there?” you ask gently.

“Leveling.”

Why, you don’t know. You never knew you needed any “leveling” and when you scan the yard everything looks pretty much the same as it did before. Best not to ask questions. Sometimes it’s a trench, sometimes it’s some awkward pruning, one time, a random pond — a project that morphed into a summer-long battle against pH imbalances in the water, koi (which became an all-you-can-eat buffet for the local raccoons), and grateful mosquito parents looking for the ideal stagnant breeding ground, until he finally filled it back in and we were able to resume our marriage.

Because we are on our third child, we already have all the equipment that we truly need, so now we are on to the stuff that we don’t need. Like gazebos, and playhouses, a new toddler bed (just because we don’t feel like using the one we already have) and wagons and things. Stuff that gives us the illusion of control, so that when the baby comes, we will have lots of extra things to put people in and places to go to play in and be distracted and not cry and freak out when someone new usurps all the attention.

This, of course, is absurd.

Everyone knows that we can build all the play structures in the world, but if our children see one spider skitter across it, they will not return to said structure for years to come, even if it did take their father 10 sweaty, frenzied man-hours to install a working sink in that fucking play kitchen.

So it’s just not that alluring for my husband to have to put together specific useless things meant solely to satisfy my need for some semblance of baby preparedness. But I have to say, he does a great job of pretending to be OK with it.

Here is how it goes in our home:

Me: Do you mind putting this [ludicrously complicated] children’s play barbecue together? I think the kids will get a kick out of it.

Him: [Well, I was planning to hollow out an old tree today to make a dugout canoe for no reason, but ...] No problem!

And then, at around the two-hour mark:

Him: Oh Goddamn it. What the HELL. This is PHYSICALLY IMPOSSIBLE.

Me: Are you OK in there? Do you need me to come in and read the instructions?

Him: NO. There is not a HUMAN BEING ALIVE who could COMPLETE THIS TASK. It’s ALL IN TAIWANESE.

Me: I can see right there that it’s in English.

Him: It’s a BAD TRANSLATION. And all the holes are drilled wrong!

Pause.

Me: Is everything upside down and backwards?

Extra long pause.

Him: [Quietly] Yes.

Everything is always upside down and backwards, at least for stage one of the building process. But eventually, with a lot of food and beverage support and my continued whisking away of the children, the job gets done, and it is always perfect.

As I write this, in fact, he is beside me ordering a giant cedar play structure (his idea!) that he plans to erect somewhere in the woods behind our little house. I assume it will require clearing brush and stumps to some degree, perhaps digging holes and even, maybe, “leveling” with purpose. A friend of ours just built a similar structure and his wife told me that it took him no less than 30 solid man-hours of expletives and marital strife to complete the task. But it looks great, and I’m sure their children have played on it for at least 30 minutes since it was built (three months ago), which greatly exceeds our minimum requirement for deluding ourselves that we are doing something our children will appreciate. I won’t see him for days, maybe even weeks. It’s possible that I will have to give birth alone, while he wrestles with the lean-to mini-rock wall that has temporarily been installed upside down and backwards. And I can honestly say that I don’t mind one bit. Bless his lovely heart.

Samantha Bee is the Most Senior Correspondent on “The Daily Show With Jon Stewart,” and the author of “I Know I Am, but What Are You?” (Gallery Books).

The eggs were something of a departure, given their utter uselessness. Actually, strike that. That insistence on functionality over aesthetics is something of a lie I tell myself, possibly homophobic in nature, or else it’s a penitential inoculation against my getting too big for my britches. If I stress utility, I will be less tempted to think of the visual stuff I make as “art,” and consequently of myself as a you-know-what, a label really only rightly conferred by others. I’ve certainly lost myself in making purely ornamental things before — lino cuts, paper cuts, snow globes, etc. — but I do get an extra lift if the finished product is practical to boot.

The most recent obsession just prior to the egg project was duct tape wallets, a perfect storm of pretty and pragmatic that lasted for a good few years. Virtually everyone I know received a duct tape wallet (or in a few rare cases — three to be exact — a duct tape evening clutch), rendered in multicolored Paul Smith-style stripes. (Check out TapeBrothers.com, which features an extraordinary selection, even my most-loathed pattern of all time after perhaps animal print anything: camouflage. But brace yourself for the hatred of your UPS guy; good duct tape is very heavy.)

The wallets got nicer and nicer, the craftsmanship ever more deft, and often there is sufficient gratification in that, but with each new billfold, I felt the pleasure of creation ebbing ever farther out. Until one day, like Chris Cooper’s orchid thief character in the movie “Adaptation” who, having exhausted his ichthyological jones to such an extent that it was expunged from his system with a final pescaphobic verdict of “fuck fish,” I knew that I could not, for the time being, bear to hear that whining protest from the sticky roll as I tore off another length of tape, no matter how pretty the color. So, no more wallets. They would take their place alongside the miniature Japanese folding screens, slide-top wooden boxes, and countless other crafting jags, never to be returned to, for the moment at least.

The fallow period never lasts long, though. I have let half-decades elapse between books, because books have to be written and writing is awful, but if you are the type of person who makes things, there is no profit in worrying about how or why or when the next project will come into being beyond simply acknowledging that it is inevitable that it will be very soon. In this particular instance, I was cooking something and thought, Why don’t I blow these eggs out instead of cracking them and then I can mount them on those golf tees? (Wooden golf tees, easily 500 in number, a failed promotion for a sports book at a day job I left over 12 years ago. I took them out of the publisher’s garbage and brought them home where they sat in a cupboard all these years, just waiting for the moment they would be needed. Needed for what? I never knew, only that their day would come and that I should resist the occasional desire to make some order in the apartment by throwing out a tin of 500 golf tees.) It really was as simple as that.

There was at least something gratifying in how, if they couldn’t be useful, they evidenced thrift; kitchen and office waste, both repurposed, coming together as a unified object. The eggs sank — their downward slide slowed by a bead of glue — and settled upon their small wooden pedestals with a satisfying stability, the way an arch actually derives strength from downward pressure. But the putty-brown eggshell and colored wooden tees were ugly. Happily, other corporate pilferings over the years meant I have a drawerful of good old-fashioned Sharpies. Now matte black, the egg sculptures’ chromatic sins were hidden, leaving behind the pristine and almost Brancusi-like elegance of their form.

After describing them to a sculptor friend, she showed up the next day with a small plastic container of powdered graphite and two solid Koh-i-Noor graphite sticks. “I thought it might make the surfaces more interesting.” She was right. Graphite is a marvelous material to work with; slippery and fine and deeply insinuating. The hematite-black powder worked its way into the pores of the shells, deepening and silvering the shell; the light and the dark occupying the same space like a photographic negative.

Now they looked forged, as heavy as iron doorstops. Another friend misjudged the weight of one — it is an empty egg — her hand ready for the heft of at least 5 pounds of metal against her palm. The thing went flying, breaking in pieces.

I was surprised by two things: One, that the inner membrane of the egg was still moist, and even warm, fully weeks after being emptied. Such enduring evidence of its animal past despite its mineral-looking present. Second, it was incredibly easy to repair. Actually, let’s make that three things: I was unprepared for the repaired egg, with its dings and divots and fissures, to be not just lovelier and more interesting-looking than its whole counterpart, but to evoke feelings of almost parental protectiveness and affection in me. My friend left, apologizing profusely. I impressed upon her repeatedly how little I minded, how truly OK it was.

When she was a safe distance from the apartment, I broke all the eggs.

The reassembly is slapdash, employing all manner of adhesives: Elmer’s, a stronger wood glue found in the cupboard, nail polish (the cheapest clear varnish purchased from a clearance bowl at the Duane Reade). There was one specimen I feared was irreparable, so uniquely smithereened was he in his table drop (despite their undeniable femalehood — they are ova, after all — I think of them as male, probably something to do with the gunmetal masculinity of their finish and the scrimmaging jostle required in their creation). He had to be triaged, reassembled shard by shard with tweezers and a fine-webbed ligature of hospital gauze, making him resemble one of the evil neighbor boy Sid’s chimerical monsters from the original “Toy Story” movie. He’s found a good home and is doing quite well by all accounts.

Calamity might be central to their creation, but the fact that I settled on the graphite eggs only proves that there are no accidents. These wounded soldiers are really the only logical things I could be making right now. In the last year-and-a-half, I have been in surgery four times, with more likely still to come. What choice do I have, really, than to mend, resurface and buff these marred specimens back to some sort of life, and to hope to see in their patched and valiant surfaces something like beauty?

Michael Surtees