THE PICTURE NOT TAKEN

A photographer known for his evocative portraits of urban trees writes both mystically and matter-of-factly about the art form.

“What I see through the lens of my camera, the picture I take, is just what is there and not what is not,” Swett writes at the end of this brief memoir and meditation. It’s a statement as elusive—and as meaningful—as Miles Davis’ observation that the silences in music are as important as the notes, but it works, perhaps more so than an early moment in which Swett and friends ponder “the arbitrariness of any of our constructed realities.” Peppering his pages with photographs from both family albums and his portfolio, Swett celebrates his aspirational father, who first put a camera in his son’s hands even while taking not entirely masterful art images as he worked for years as a photojournalist (“My father wasn’t fast enough on the focus and the birds, zooming around on their own courses, came out as hazy ideas rather than fast facts”). Though his father never enjoyed personal renown, he serves as a fine example of a work ethic and a practice that made something memorable of “the heavy, high-priced hunk of glass and metal that we call a camera.” That hunk of glass and metal, of course, has been an object of adoration—and plenty of shoptalk—for generations of photographers. On that note, and worth plenty of conversations among photographers now, Swett questions the use of the cell phone as a camera, for even as he does so himself, he allows that “it’s a bit creepy to think that every shot I take on my iPhone has been pre-visualized by an algorithm.”

A provocative book to shelve alongside Sontag, Barthes, Cartier-Bresson, and other philosophers of the image.