The Picture Not Taken

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.

Benjamin Swett is the author of Route 22 and New York City of Trees, winner of the 2013 New York City Book Award for Photography. Essays from The Picture Not Taken have been published or are forthcoming in Agni, Salmagundi, Orion, Fiction, and Prism International. Three of them (＂The Picture Not Taken,＂ ＂VR,＂ and ＂My Father’s Green Album＂) were chosen as Notable Essays in Best American Essays 2020, 2021, and 2022. ＂What I wanted to Tell You About the Wind＂ was the Editor’s Choice essay in the Spring 2021 Orion.