Saturday, October 26th 2024 at 3pm
Book Reading and Discussion:
The Picture Not Taken: On Life and Photography
by Benjamin Swett
Free to attend. Registration is requested.

Photographer Benjamin Swett will be at TSL to read from his new book, The Picture Not Taken: On Life and Photography, followed by a conversation with writer editor, photographer and lecturer Annik Lafarge.

Copies of the book will be on hand for purchase and signing by the author.

Benjamin Swett will be reading from the essay What I Wanted to Tell You About the Wind, appearing in his new book The Picture Not Taken: On Life and Photography. He explores the vastness of the nonhuman world and the particular ways humans create for themselves to see into what is in fact beyond individual comprehension. Ruminating on Shaker architecture, the computer modeling of ecologists, and the suggestions of a branch tossed about in the wind outside the insomniac author’s window, the essay explores the equivocal complexities that even the most rigid and upright soul must acknowledge for a spiritually fulfilling life.

From the Publisher: 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 unforeseen 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.

This event is free to attend. We ask that you pre-register by clicking the Free Ticket Button above, so that we can know how many people are attending.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Benjamin Swett is a writer and photographer whose books include the photo-text narratives Route 22 and New York City of Trees (winner of the 2013 New York City Book Award for Photography). Recent essays have appeared in Agni, Arnoldia, Salmagundi, Orion, Prism International, and Fiction magazines. He was named the 2024 Larry Lederman Photography Fellow at the New York Botanical Garden. Swett is the author and photographer of guidebooks to the Hudson Valley and to New York City’s Great Trees. A writer and photographer for the New York City Parks Department for thirteen years, Swett founded the Parks in Print program, which produced books, brochures, maps, and guides for parks around New York City’s five boroughs. He currently teaches writing at City College in Manhattan and is senior photographer for the Notion Archaeological Project in Turkey.

ABOUT ANNIK LAFARGE:
Annik LaFarge is the author of On the High Line: The Definitive Guide, Chasing Chopin, and, since 2009, the blog LivinTheHighLine.com. Much of her work, both online and in print, uses photography to advance a narrative. For the recently published 3rd edition of On the High Line she built a companion website that has more than 650 photographs, including historic, contemporary, rooftop and aerial (HighLineBook.com). A former book publishing executive, she lives in Hudson.

What others are saying about this book:

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

‘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

‘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