 The story begins with the authorial narrative voice of Mr P. first sighting the photograph taken in the months before the outbreak of World War I of three young boys in Germany - a photograph which is titled Three Farmers on their Way to a Dance and which is being exhibited at the Detroit Institute of Arts.The novel follows the fictional fates of these three young men in war time, as well as the stories of Peter Mays, a technical editor for a 1980s electronics magazine and Mr P - the first person narrator of sections of the novel - who is obsessed with the photograph and with concepts of photography and technology.Powers's later novel "Galatea 2.2", published in 1995, uses the first person perspective of semifictional narrator Richard Powers to describe to a large extent the conditions under which Powers wrote "Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance".