ABOUT

The Photographs Not Taken is a collection of essays by photographers about the times they didn't use their camera. This collection is a series of photographs not taken with a camera, but, instead, lived and remembered. Here the basic set of rules that apply to the making of a photograph are put into reverse; instead of looking out into the world through a camera lens, this series of essays looks directly into the photographer's eye and mind and focuses on where the photographs come from. The photograph has been stripped-down to its most simple and primitive form: the idea, instinct, reaction, the before; while simultaneously opening the door for reflection, meaning, content and the after. I have asked each photographer to abandon the familiar tools needed to make a photograph, camera, lens, film, all digital equivalents, etc, and now make a "photograph" with another set of tools: the memories, experiences and poetry of the world that didn't go through the lens, the negative photographs, the anti-photographs, the photographs not taken with a camera but with the heart and mind.


NEW STORY

KayLynn Deveney

I usually get to know people before I start photographing them. I explain myself, my process and my perspective and then – if they agree – I start to photograph. In working on long projects there are many photographs that I choose not to make, but I do not lament the “loss” of these photographs. For whatever reason my intuition at the time is to not photograph, and I trust that. But when I am with strangers, photographing in a manner more like street photography, I am shy about raising my camera. Sometimes I don’t when I wish I had; other times I am too slow, delayed by a momentary hesitation about whether I should or shouldn’t take the picture. Those are the photographs it stings to lose. They take up residence in my mind, and hang around to remind me that they don’t exist anywhere in the real world.

I had been living in Northern Ireland for several months working on a photographic piece that I hoped could offer some commentary on what average days in Belfast were like in the mid-1990s. I was less interested in bonfires than home fires, less interested in soldiers than tea dances and piano bars. I was walking up a major road in West Belfast on a damp, gray morning before much was going on in the streets. The seagulls were calling overhead and swirling and I felt alone and quiet. Then I saw a man walking toward me, his coat buttoned up against the elements. The scene seemed colorless, just steel sky, silver gulls and iron-gray coat. Then, for just a second, the gulls flocked around and behind him like attendants and in that moment it seemed as if he reflected the soul of the industrial northern city, forged from metal and mist. In that same moment I hesitated, and my camera hung still around my neck. We passed shoulders.

This memory is over 10 years old now. Who knows how I have changed it over time, remembering some things correctly while other aspects inevitably shift or disappear? But it is an image that I think about more than any photograph that I have actually made.


CONTRIBUTING ARTISTS

Alec Soth, Amy Elkins, Amy Stein, Andrew Moore, Benjamin Donaldson, Brian Ulrich, Chris Jordan, Christian Patterson, Dave Jordano, Debbie Fleming Caffery, Eirik Johnson, Elinor Carucci, Erika Larsen, Grant Willing, John Movius, Juliana Beasley, Laura McPhee, Lewis Watts, Lisa Kereszi, Mark Steinmetz, Matt Salacuse, Michael Harlan Turkell, Misty Keasler, Nina Berman, Paul D’Amato, Peter Riesett, Rachael Dunville, Rian Dundon, Richard Renaldi, Shane Lavalette, Simon Roberts, Tim Davis, Timothy Archibald, Todd Deutsch, Todd Hido, William Greiner and Wyatt Gallery.


EXCERPTS FROM THE COLLECTION

“I remember opening my mouth in amazement, but before anything came out, in the next instant my three-year-old son, who was wearing nothing but a pair of bright red swim trunks, ran under the apple tree and stopped with his back to me in the middle of the smoke cloud, stretching his arms out wide so the smoky rays streamed through his fingers as his body became part of the sunburst. For just a moment he stood basking in the center of the light like a tiny monk beholding The Answer.

My camera was on the picnic table about two steps from my right hand. I half-turned toward it, then stopped because I saw that the scene was only going to last another second--it was fading already--and now the smoke drifted on through the tree and the sunburst evaporated, and Emerson turned and ran back to his friends. That was it. I looked around. No one else had noticed it. The whole spectacle had lasted just a few seconds.”

-Chris Jordan


“On the day that we were to receive our daughter, I decided to shoot video instead. I set up the cheap camera on a tripod and pointed it to the location where we were standing in the orphanage. On the recording my wife and I are seen smiling nervously with anticipation. You hear a nurse walk into the room, my wife shrieks with joy, opens her arms, and we both step out of the frame. The single most remarkable event of our life was documented only in audio. Perhaps the mystery only makes it more meaningful.”

-Alec Soth


“That night, something I witnessed stayed with me: a glimpse of my mother through the wide open door of their bedroom. She was wearing her torn nightgown and a single sock, posing suggestively for my father as he took her picture.

Years later, I found my father’s picture from that night in a stack of discarded snapshots in our junk drawer. It was like something out of a “Reader’s Wives” section in a porno mag. That’s definitely where this kind of image comes from.

Somehow we have moments saved forever in that drawer that you’d think a family wouldn’t want to remember. The photo remained there for years and years. Occasionally, it would migrate to the top of the drawer. I’ve since swiped it.”

-Todd Hido


“My camera, a mahogany box which takes 8x10 film, is in the back; the sheet film lies nestled in its cooler. I feel the pull to take a picture in this extraordinary light, a pull made more acute by that nagging awareness that things are never quite the same twice. I stop participating in the word game; the sound of it moves further into the back seats. I want to speak to the driver and I practice the words. In my mind I can hear myself, “Please stop, I’ll only be a moment. Stop here in front of this billboard advertising those mountains and their offer of sunny, safe happy family style recreation. And please, hold the flashlight, hand me the lens, the dark cloth, the carpenter’s level.”
---
“It is not too late,” says the voice in my head. But I do not speak. The sound of my voice does not interrupt the river of time, does not change the flow of the action or the encounters we will have that evening. I do not intercept time by making a photograph; its pulse continues unaltered. We pass the billboard and I console myself in two ways. First, I know that most photographs taken are a gamble at best. Second and more important: I remind myself to find the pleasure in this moment, a time in which the red sky passes to black, children create unanticipated rhymes, and the stars fall closer to earth.”

-Laura McPhee


“As I approached the house, I heard it crackling, sizzling and wheezing. The air smelled burnt. The ground rumbled. It would all be gone in minutes. Just as I was raising my camera to my eye, a truck roared into the driveway.

A man jumped out of the truck and ran into the yard. He fell to his knees, put his hands on his head, and began crying.

Helpless, he watched the fire destroy his house and everything inside it. And I watched him.”

-Christian Patterson


“I often wonder about the many, many images I will never make of John. What they may have looked like individually and how over the years of our marriage and our life the absence of these images will effect they way that we remember how we were.

They could exist but they don’t. They exist only in memory and the past.”

-Amy Stein


“As we were talking a group of girls from a local charity came into the room and together they began to sing. It was a haunting, spiritual and utterly captivating sound that filled the small room. The girls, including Priscilla, began to cry as they sang. For the first time in my career, I felt physically unable to take a photograph.

No image, however accomplished, could have captured the agonizing poignancy of that moment. It was a moment to be lived, not framed, analysed or reduced in any way. A photograph could not have conveyed the horrors that Priscilla had experienced in her short life nor her acknowledgement that she would soon be leaving this world.”

-Simon Roberts


“I’m psyched and happy with the feeling of bringing home pictures I’ve only fantasized about making, and the small buzz of sneaking down warm beer at the tavern. Skipping a few blocks, remembering the shots, I’m brought back to earth. I never did have film in the camera. For a second, it felt like I blew it. Oddly, that feeling went away quickly. As I walked back and found my way to my father, I realized that some door had been opened for me. I had found a way in with these people, they accepted me and my camera, and I wasn’t afraid. This ability to enter someone’s world is out there on the horizon, it can be mine to tap into. These pictures never taken led me to understand that there really is nothing to be afraid of.”

-Timothy Archibald