The Picture Not Taken

Series: New York Review Books
ISBN: 9781681378633
Pages: 208
Publication Date: October 29, 2024

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

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

For those of us who like a lot of prose along with our photography, this book is a real treat...Written beautifully – but also accessibly – we get a look at thoughts on the family snapshot, the shape of abiding love, but also more difficult topics, such as racial violence and unforeseen loss.
— Amateur Photographer Magazine