The Picture Not Taken - by Benjamin Swett (Paperback)

About the Book

"An ecologically minded collection of essays in the vein of Rebecca Solnit and Susan Sontag-covering everything from the equipment of photography to the difficulties of perception itself. In an age when most of us carry a device seemingly capable of freeze-framing the world, Benjamin Swett writes with refreshing clarity on the way of the true photographer. Combines cultural criticism with personal revelation to examine how the lived experience of photography can endow the mundane with meaning while bringing attention to the beauty of both the natural world and the world we build. Having photographed trees of Manhattan, Shaker dwellings, and the landscapes of upstate New York, award-winning photographer and writer Swett brings an ecological sensitivity to these expansive and profound meditations on how to document the world around us. Accompanied by nearly three dozen black-and-white photographs and illustrations, the essays take us from Coney Island in the early 70s to Paris and Prado at the turn of the last century. By turns literary criticism, art history, and memoir, they draw from writers such as Eric Sanderson, Max Frisch, and John Berger to uncover truths about a life spent in pursuit of art. In essays such as "The Picture Not Taken," "The Beauty of the Camera," and "My Father's Green Album" Swett gives us a picture of photography over generations and how we can or should relate to the mechanical devices so often fetishized by those interested in the subject. In "What I wanted to Tell You About the Wind" we understand photography's importance in understanding our place in larger environmental and social systems; and in "VR" and "Some Observations in the Galapagos" Swett challenges us to think through problems of perception and knowing central to the experience of photography, looking to the past and into our future for answers. Poignant and deftly crafted, The Picture Not Taken brings to mind the fearless ambition of Annie Dillard and the grand scope of Rebecca Solnit's Field Guide to Getting Lost. Swett's writing will appeal to readers who have enjoyed Geoff Dyer's work, and Susan Sontag's writing on photography"--

Book Synopsis

An ecologically minded collection of essays in the vein of Rebecca Solnit and Susan Sontag, covering everything from the equipment of photography to the difficulties of perception itself.

In The Picture Not Taken, the photographer and writer Benjamin Swett considers the intersections between photography, memory, the natural world, and the course of life in essays on subjects that include family snapshots, images of racial violence, the shape of abiding love, and the experience of unforseen and irremediable loss. In these beautifully written, deeply affecting pages, Swett moves with a wonderful improvisatory freedom among his chosen themes. The Picture Not Taken is a book of transfixing pieces that possesses the intensity and integrity and heft of the wholly new.

Review Quotes

"A photographer known for his evocative portraits of urban trees writes both mystically and matter-of-factly about the art form....A provocative book to shelve alongside Sontag, Barthes, Cartier-Bresson, and other philosophers of the image." -- Kirkus Reviews

"This marvellous meditation on memory and seeing asks us, with a rare power, to take nothing for granted." --Amit Chaudhuri

"The title of this essay collection ...hints that it won't be about photography in the narrow sense, and indeed, it isn't. Rather, it's an extended meditation on the entire field of memory, emotion, personal connections, and the larger world as these forces find expression in individual images." --Michael Dashkin, Library Journal

"The Picture Not Taken is a book for artists working in any art genre who dare to peer at their motivations." - Ron Slate, On the Seawall

"In this astute, stealthily devastating book, writer and photographer Benjamin Swett beautifully conveys not only what he sees through the iris of the camera lens, but the complex, infinite imperatives of the biosphere outside the frame. A subtle re-imagining of the possibilities of the American essay, The Picture Not Taken is a haunting meditation on the visible world and the cast shadow of tragedy." --Cynthia Zarin

"Serious photography is an art. The 'taken' tells on the 'taker.' Beautifully written, Benjamin Swett's The Picture Not Taken shows how an awareness becomes a passion, and that passion a calling. His avid eye reorganizes our attention, elevates the incidental, and fastens on the details that replenish the world around us." --Sven Birkerts

"Benjamin Swett's essays reminded me most immediately of WG Sebald in Rings of Saturn the voice of a traveler whose roving, insatiable, and eclectic intellect cannot resist the enticements of art, religion, architecture, poetry, natural history, memoir. Here Goya's Maja meets Seamus Heaney meets Shaker design. Here the wind provokes the shadows of branches and memories of a father. The excitement is in following Swett into the labyrinth of his own mind as he synthesizes and explores. But the work is also deeply personal, and I was most moved by the striking candor, and the bafflement and awe of this questioning heart." --Peter Heller, bestselling author of The Dog Stars and Burn

"To write about animals or nature or even God, to place them dead center is to find oneself inside a moment that is neither writing nor photography as when a turtle blinks and the world doesn't so much hold still as continues to unfold while we are locking eyes with what doesn't want to be the center of it all. Benjamin Swett's essays evince a swirling hunger to be included in that unfolding that surrounds, so what he's created here is a motion-filled kind of reading experience which seems as transparent as nature or conversation or family, but none of that is true, each of those are dense but nonetheless he's moved the needle of where we sit in our imagining just a little bit which is enormous I think in the history of the world." --Eileen Myles

About the Author

Benjamin Swett is the author of Route 22 and New York City of Trees, which won the 2013 New York City Book Award for Photography. He teaches writing at the City College of New York and was named the Larry Lederman Photography Fellow at the New York Botanical Garden for 2024.