Who Is Michael David Murphy and What Is the Unphotographable Project?

Michael David Murphy is a photographer and writer associated with Unphotographable, a project hosted at unphotographable.com that reverses the usual logic of a photoblog: instead of publishing pictures, it publishes text accounts of pictures that were not taken. Each entry is a written description of a missed or impossible photograph, which makes the site closer to a daily observational writing practice than to a photo gallery. It is useful to you if you are interested in photography as seeing rather than as image-making, or if you want a model for turning fleeting moments into short written pieces.

The core idea: a picture you did not take

The project's defining move is stated in its own recurring line, "This is a picture I did not take." The site describes itself as "a text account of pictures missed." So the subject of each piece is an image that existed only briefly — a scene the author noticed but did not or could not capture — and the writing stands in for the photograph.

This is the opposite of a conventional photoblog. There is no image to look at; the reader reconstructs the scene from the description. The "photograph" exists only in language.

What a typical entry looks like

Entries are prose, not captions. They tend to be single flowing sentences or short paragraphs that accumulate concrete detail rather than summarizing a scene.

The About page excerpt gives a representative example. It describes a week that included a press conference in Philadelphia "next door to an adult book shop and across the street from a crematorium," then shifts to walking "in a city far away with our dog and our kid scooting his scooter." The narration piles up small physical facts — tree bark on the sidewalk, the dog sniffing and pulling the leash, nails scraping pavement, the scooter jammed with bark, a neighbor's tree being trimmed, a truck parked the wrong way with its driver-side door facing the narrator — and lands on a single readable detail: the door says FOUR SEASONS LANDSCAPING.

The pattern to notice:

• A specific time and place, often named or implied (Philadelphia; a city far away).
• Ordinary, unposed activity — errands, walking the dog, a kid on a scooter.
• Accumulated sensory and situational detail rather than a punchline.
• One concrete found text or object that anchors the scene (the landscaping truck's door).

Themes and settings

The site's own keywords point to San Francisco and Atlanta, alongside "photos," "pics," "photoblog," "poetry," and "poem." That mix is a fair summary of the content: urban and everyday scenes from those places, written with an attention to language that reads as poetic even though the pieces are observational prose.

Recurring subject matter includes street life, neighbors, animals, children, signage, and the small collisions of unrelated things happening at once — as in the excerpt, where a press conference, an adult book shop, and a crematorium share a block.

How it differs from a normal photoblog

The practical consequence: you cannot browse it the way you browse a gallery. You read it, and the "image" is whatever your reading produces.

Why the project is worth knowing

If you photograph, Unphotographable is a reminder that noticing is separable from capturing — that the moment of seeing can be recorded in words when the camera is unavailable, inappropriate, or simply not raised. If you write, it is a working example of a repeatable daily form: one scene, concrete details, no forced conclusion. And if you are trying to identify who Michael David Murphy is in relation to the site, the answer is straightforward — he is the photographer and writer behind it, and the project is his text-based record of the pictures he did not take.