Benjamin Swett and Sven Birkerts at Harvard Book Store

Harvard Book Store welcomes Benjamin Swett—winner of the 2013 New York City Book Award for Photography—for a discussion of his new book The Picture Not Taken: On Life and Photography and Sven Birkerts—editor of AGNI and author of Changing the Subject: Art and Attention in the Internet Age—for a discussion of his new book The Miró Worm and the Mysteries of Writing. 

About The Picture Not Taken

In an age when most of us carry a device seemingly capable of freeze-framing the world, Benjamin Swett writes with refreshing clarity on the way of the true photographer. The Picture Not Taken combines cultural criticism with personal revelation to examine how the lived experience of photography can endow the mundane with meaning while bringing attention to the beauty of both the natural world and the world we build.

Having photographed trees of Manhattan, Shaker dwellings, and the landscapes of upstate New York, award-winning photographer and writer Swett brings an ecological sensitivity to these expansive and profound meditations on how to document the world around us. Accompanied by nearly three dozen black-and-white photographs and illustrations, the essays in The Picture Not Taken take us from the meatpacking plants of Chicago at the turn of the last century to Coney Island to early 1980s Madrid. By turns literary criticism, art history, and memoir, they draw from writers such as Eric Sanderson, Max Frisch, and John Berger to uncover truths about a life spent in pursuit of art.

In essays such as “The Picture Not Taken,” “The Beauty of the Camera,” and “My Father’s Green Album” Swett gives us a picture of photography over generations and how we can or should relate to the mechanical devices so often fetishized by those interested in the subject. In “What I wanted to Tell You About the Wind” we understand photography’s importance in understanding our place in larger environmental and social systems; and in “VR” and “Some Observations in the Galapagos” Swett challenges us to think through problems of perception and knowing central to the experience of photography, looking to the past and into our future for answers.

Poignant and deftly crafted, The Picture Not Taken brings to mind the fearless ambition of Annie Dillard and the grand scope of Rebecca Solnit’s Field Guide to Getting Lost. Swett’s writing will appeal to readers who have enjoyed Geoff Dyer’s work, and Susan Sontag’s writing on photography.

Praise for The Picture Not Taken

“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

About The Miró Worm and the Mysteries of Writing

One of America's most honored and respected essayists, Sven Birkerts, returns with a riveting new collection. In The Miró Worm and the Mysteries of Writing, Birkerts reflects on fundamental questions every writer grapples with at one time or another: "Ah, the old questions, the good questions, the questions that seem so very basic on the surface, but then you get caught in the implications and realize that they go on and on and that you'll only go crazy trying to answer them." What does it mean to be a writer today, when so many other media compete for audiences? With the humanities seemingly everywhere in retreat, Birkerts probes the singular possibilities offered by a fixed text in a world dominated by social media. Meditating on everything from smart phones to photography, Borges to Dylan, Birkerts proves that "the right words in the right order" continue to offer readers a pathway through the labyrinth.

Praise for The Miró Worm and the Mysteries of Writing 

“Birkerts’ rich essays are at once exhilarating and revelatory, illuminating literature, language, photography and the world as we know it, and in ways entirely new. He raises urgent questions about our intellectual and aesthetic future.”—Claire Messud, author of This Strange Eventful History

“More open and liberating than a manifesto; unlike a rigid rule-book, relaxed and improvisatory, jazz-like. Genuinely exploratory and honest, this is a truly inspiring exercise in and about writing. Not only the book as a whole, each paragraph, from sentence to sentence!”—Amitava Kumar, author of My Beloved Life: A Novel

Masking Policy

Masks are encouraged but not required for this event.