The obvious solution, in retrospect, was for the DUP to get an artist's impression of decommissioning. Along with clergymen from both communities, General de Chastelain could have been accompanied by representatives of the North's rival mural painting traditions.
These could have rendered the scene in the styles required by their constituencies (photo-realism for Paisleyites, abstract expressionism for republicans), and everybody would have been happy.
Instead, yet again, the failure of one of the parties to see the big picture (or a series of small ones) brought the deal down.
The disagreement over photography was all the more frustrating because it was clear that the DUP would have stopped short of demanding any negatives. On the contrary, the party insists that all the negatives from this process belong firmly to Sinn Féin.
After decades of saying "no", Dr Paisley is presenting himself as a man ready to perform the Molly Bloom soliloquy as soon as conditions are right.
And last night he was insisting that it was Sinn Féin who stopped the talks.
Earlier, Bertie Ahern and Tony Blair sounded fiercely optimistic as they published their proposals. When the Taoiseach patted him on the shoulder during the press conference, Mr Blair must have been disappointed that it wasn't the hand of history, this time. But, never a man to refuse a soundbite, he portrayed himself and his opposite number as Himalayan climbers. "Just when you think you've reached the peak," he sighed, "you see another mound." This was only a small mound, however, and after a short breather they would begin the final assault.
Shortage of oxygen was clearly not a problem: the two men spoke for a full hour. And it has never been a problem for Dr Paisley either.
The DUP leader doesn't need the sight of a mountain summit to encourage him to go over the top. Last night, taking up where his Prime Minister left off, he ("we have come a long, long way") climbed on ahead, to deliver a sermon on the mound.
In what is no doubt a favourite image, he suggested that the IRA had ended discussions on photographs because the "heat was getting to their toes".
Asked if talk of humiliation of the IRA had helped, he refused apologies.
"Murder is murder, blood-shedding is blood-shedding, torture is torture," he said.
But, in what passes for compromise from the new DUP, he ended by offering his enemies an alternative. They didn't have to wear "sackcloth and ashes", he said. A simple "hairshirt" would do.
