Diane Keaton, the beloved actress known for her singular style and screen presence, died Saturday at the age of 79. While she was primarily celebrated for her iconic roles—such as the title character in Woody Allen’s 1977 film Annie Hall and Kay Adams-Corleone in The Godfather—Keaton was also a devoted maker of art, particularly in the fields of photography and collage.
In 2022, Keaton released Saved: My Picture World, described as a kind of “visual autobiography” composed of images selected by the actress and photographs taken by Keaton herself with her Rolleiflex camera, as well as photo collages, scrapbook pages, and more abstract works by her brother, Randy.
To mark the book’s release, Keaton shared a video on Instagram discussing her lifelong fascination with collage, which she said she had practiced with her siblings since childhood.
“I spent a lot of my evenings, because I was a single woman in New York and I was trying to be an actress and things like that. So I did a lot of collages. I couldn’t stop myself,” Keaton said in the 2022 video. “I was really playing around with fantasies all the time.”
Still, Keaton didn’t exactly think of herself as “much of an artist,” at least according to an August interview with House Beautiful.
“I’m just a person who cuts out paper, throws it up on the wall, or finds old photographs that I see at the swap meet and throw them up on the wall,” Keaton said. “I mean, I have tons of that—tons, tons, tons. And I have a very long table. And I like to play around with cutting objects and putting them in the same moment—maybe I present them as little collages. But nothing important.”
Interestingly, Saved wasn’t the first art book published by Keaton. In 1980, Knopf released Reservations, a monograph of her black-and-white images of old hotel interiors shot throughout the 1970s. In 2017, she published The House That Pinterest Built, on home design, and in 2019, she released California Romantica, a coffee-table book dedicated to Southern California architecture.
Keaton was also a tireless collector of photography books, telling the New York Times in 2014 that her dream was to “purchase every photography book ever published,” buy an old warehouse, and transform it “into a massive library of image-driven books and open it to the public.”
Images and art-making were always central to Keaton’s life. In that same Times interview, she said that French artist Sophie Calle’s Blind stays on her nightstand, calling it “a reminder of one of the greatest gifts of life—the gift of seeing.”
