The weekend brought the sad news of Diane Keaton’s passing, yet it offers a moment to reflect not just on her iconic film career but also on her profound and personal contributions as an artist and photographer. Her final published book, Saved: My Picture World, stands as a beautiful, posthumous invitation into the unique landscape of her mind.
More than a simple photo collection, Saved is a visual autobiography told as only Keaton could tell it. It’s a cabinet of saved and found photographic curiosities, a scrapbook of her fascinations, and a direct reflection of her idiosyncratic charm.
The book is a glimpse into her lifelong passion for images, spanning from the peculiar to the deeply personal. The collection of photos starts with an homage to film that reveals her enduring love for the strange and surreal through rare, humorous stills of “B” horror flicks.
Most personally revealing, however, are the photographs taken with her own eye, capturing moments from life — like pigeons during a break from filming Reds or the “greeters” of Hollywood Boulevard caught on her Rolleiflex — revealing a world she personally saw, experienced and cherished.
Keaton’s debut photography book, Reservations (1980), captured a quiet, evocative world that foreshadowed her deep interest in architecture and design. Using her Rolleiflex camera, Keaton explored the unloved interiors of classic American hotels across the country, documenting their lobbies, ballrooms, and lounges in stark, square-format black and white images.
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The photographs often used direct flash to illuminate the forgotten grandeur of these spaces — the ornate wallpapers, velvet upholstery and solitary pieces of furniture — lending the collection an idiosyncratic, cool and subtly unsettling aesthetic that distinguished her work behind the lens.
Beyond her collections of personal photography, Keaton extended her visual passion into the realm of architecture and design. She released books that celebrated her aesthetic interests, including The House That Pinterest Built (2017), which serves as a personal style guide chronicling the creation of her own home using inspiration gathered from the internet platform. She also authored California Romantica (2019), a volume dedicated to the preservation and appreciation of Southern California’s distinct architectural styles. These books, rich with numerous images, solidified her reputation as a formidable tastemaker and advocate for design history.
It’s impossible to separate Keaton’s photography from her iconic role as Annie Hall, especially during the scene where she whips out her Nikon F2. When she turns her lens on Alvy Singer (Woody Allen), you can almost hear him immediately start to fret, not about his pose, but about the very nature of the art form itself: “Photography’s interesting, ’cause… It’s a new art form, and a set of aesthetic criteria has not emerged yet.” Meanwhile, Keaton, with her cool, real-life photographer’s eye, just snaps the shutter.
“Aesthetic criteria?” Annie says. “You mean, whether it’s a good photo or not?” Alvy, momentarily deflated by her pragmatic honesty, can only sputter something about “the medium enters in as a condition of the art form itself.” But Annie, channeling the real-life Keaton who saw the world with an instinctive, art collector’s eye, simply shrugs: “Well, to me it’s all instinctive, you know. I mean, I just try to feel it and get a sense of it and not think about it so much.”
Keaton never stopped creating, and Saved: My Picture World serves as the final, compelling evidence of her profound and original visual talent. It is not just a book to be browsed, but an invitation to dive deep into the wellsprings of one of the great creative talents of our time.
Scroll down to view images and collages from her photobook.