The Picture Not Taken: On Life and Photography [Paperback]

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. 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 l)