Whitman’s preference of photography over painting would be illuminated in the light of inclusive and nondiscriminative nature of photography in contrast to exclusive and discriminative nature of painting. The poem, “Pictures” “stresses the democratic inclusiveness of photography, its capturing of all in its field in opposition to the selectivity of painting” (Price, “Walt Whitman at the Movies” 39). Whitman compared photography to poetry; both were “key elements of an emerging democratic art, an art that would level experience, break down hierarchies, undermine discrimination, and foster equality” (Folsom, “Nineteenth-century Visual Culture” 275). Whitman loved the nondiscriminative nature of photography. Whatever on the lens was recorded on