It’s one of the most memorable scenes in Annie Hall: Diane Keaton’s eponymous protagonist chatting with Alvy on the balcony of her apartment. Alvy asks if she took the photographs displayed inside. “They’re wonderful,” he says. “They have a … quality.”

She dabbles, but would like to take a proper course, replies Annie. Alvy starts waffling about “the aesthetic criteria” of a “new art form” (photography has been around for 150 years at this point). Meanwhile, his inner monologue is presented in subtitles: I don’t know what I’m saying.

“Aesthetic criteria?” Annie says. “You mean, whether it’s a good photo or not?”

Later in the film, during the lobster set piece, Annie snaps Alvy in the kitchen with a Nikon F2 Photomic. As with many aspects of her character (her style, for example), a love of photography was cribbed from the real-life Keaton. And though for Annie photography is an amateur pursuit, Keaton published multiple pictorial books in her lifetime.

In the 1970s, travelling from coast to coast, Keaton shot a series of classic American hotel interiors (she was an avid fan of architecture and design) for Rolling Stone. These pictures formed the basis of the monograph Reservations, her first book, published by Knopf in 1980. The blurb introduced the actor as “a strong, direct photographer with a cool and deadly eye”.

The images, monochrome and square and taken on her beloved Rolleiflex, show typical hotel lobbies of the era; their tension between minimalism and maximalism. The ostentatious banquettes and the baroque wallpaper; the solitary Windsor chair in the corner of an otherwise empty space.

Textures abound: the upholstery of a velvet cocktail sofa; the grain of wood-panelled walls; the reflected sheen of a plastic lamp or rubber plants. The compositions are idiosyncratic, reminiscent of that other Diane – Arbus. A waiter is cut off at the torso; just half of a painting hanging on a wall is allowed into frame; there’s a decapitated statue. If the photographic benchmark for atmospheric, cinematic interiors is the stunning output of Todd Hido, Sally Mann and William Eggleston, then Reservations deserves to be among them.

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Keaton’s passion for the visual went back to childhood. She was inspired by her mother, Dorothy Deanne Keaton Hall, a keen collagist and photographer herself. For Dorothy, looking was “a dedicated endeavour”. In the foreword for one book, her daughter writes: “The simple, sturdy, and reliable Brownie Hawkeye camera manufactured by Kodak documented our family from 1949 through 1956.”

Young Diane cut out pictures of Cary Grant from magazines to make collages. In her 20s, the actor would make large-scale photomontages – up to seven feet wide – and though she spent a life constantly creating, she characterised herself only “as a person who cuts out paper, throws it up on the wall, or finds old photographs that I see at the swap meet [flea market]”, and wielded her camera unassumingly.

Annie Hall describes her aesthetic criteria to Alvy thus: “To me it’s all instinctive. I just try to feel it and get a sense of it; to not think about it so much.” Keaton too: “I shoot the pictures, but I’m not doing them in any big way. I just like it. I like images. If I see a tree that looks unusual, I’ll just take a picture of it.”

“I’m addicted to photographs and photography books,” she told the Hollywood Reporter in 2023. She had more than 60 scrapbooks of disparate accumulated images and kept Sophie Calle’s Blind on her nightstand, to remind her of the magic of sight; that looking is a dedicated endeavour.

In an essay for New York Review of Books, Larry McMurtry once described his first meeting with Keaton: “I found her, one morning, sitting in the flower bed outside the Madison Hotel in Washington DC. She was rummaging in a bag big enough to hold a caribou, which contained a camera heavy enough to stun the caribou with, should that be necessary.”

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In addition to Reservations, Keaton released several other art books: collections of her own work behind the lens; edited volumes of pictures by arcane or wholly anonymous names; found images from adverts, newspaper archives, auction job lots and the damp basements of production companies. And, often, a mishmash of all of the above. Many of these tomes she put together with her creative partner, writer and curator Marvin Heiferman.

Still Life: Hollywood Tableaux Photographs (1983), is a study of Technicolor Hollywood comprising a plethora of studio stills, diorama-like on-set formation posing and publicity shots for magazine profiles. Fred Astaire eating soup; Ronald Reagan and Jane Wyman sunbathing; Dolores Gray in a pink Silverline convertible with two poodles and a matching haircut. Gregory Peck was so annoyed about a portrait of his that was included that he wrote Keaton a bad-tempered letter.

Keaton described the staged photos as “sad puzzles that filled me with curiosity … the most believable thing about the photographs is the absence of these people’s inner presence. I was seduced by what wasn’t being told.” Or, as Philip Larkin would put it, the record of “hold-it smiles as frauds”. Or, as Instagram would put it: yes.

In Mr Salesman (1993) Keaton and Heifermann collated stills from mid-century sales-training videos. Instead of the cheesy, saturated photos of overtly grinning reps that one might expect, there is a noir-like, Lynchian feel to the book. The subjects of the photographs might be the most conformist cogs of capitalism, and the door-to-door grind utterly prosaic, but the black and white images are frequently surreal and unnerving. A silhouette of a man standing half in shadow, power stance, hat held by his side, the patterns of light and shade bring to mind Alexander Rodchenko or Garry Winogrand. There is Brylcreem and there are brogues, but there’s also an insidious creepiness, a subtle menacing.

In 1999, the pair published Local News, a compendium of 92 photographs from the archives of the defunct tabloid Los Angeles Herald Express. “These portraits are a stockpile of neglected treasures,” Keaton wrote in the book’s introduction. “This book honours them; it honours the pretty, the hopeful, the ordinary, the murdered, the ugly, the tortured, the smug, the guilty, the lost and found … Each human face is a compelling mystery, that looks back at us like a mirror reflecting the absolute fact that we live, we die, we are forgotten.”

While much of Keaton’s own work was monochrome, 2002’s Clown Paintings, a collaboration with gallerist Robert Berman – with written contributions by Woody Allen, Dan Aykroyd, Whoopi Goldberg and more – was a bomb in a paint factory. A collection of 66 clown portraits by amateur artists, some of which Keaton owned (and had once loaned to the Warhol Museum), these clowns refused to be neglected, refused to be ordinary. Keaton was as “mesmerised by their mute eloquence as she was by their bad taste”.

Keaton returned to including her own work in Saved: My Picture World (2022), sold as a “visual autobiography”. Pigeons were the subject of some striking shots taken in London’s Trafalgar Square, 1981. (If someone were to make a list of the best pigeon photographs, this one by John Speirs must surely be top, but one of Keaton’s could easily take second place; although perhaps we must also consider the photographs taken by actual pigeons).

Keaton described how the birds took her mind off filming a demanding part in Reds (for which she later earned an Academy Award nomination). “I’m not sure why I began taking pictures of the pigeons,” she wrote. “It might have been due to their constant manic swooping down on hundreds of tourists who seemed to enjoy the outrageously close proximity of our so-called feathered friends.” Upon her death the animal rights charity PETA released a statement praising Keaton’s lifelong love for animals (she adored her golden retriever, Reggie) but which specifically mentioned her fondness for pigeons.

Another segment in Saved has Keaton turning her camera on Hollywood Boulevard to capture its lower-key denizens: Z-listers, street performers, studio greeters. “Instead of choosing to capture fabulous movie stars I was in search of the so-called ‘toss aways’. I thought of them much in the same manner I think of myself … just one more lost soul searching for some kind of redemption,” she said.

Keaton was never recognised as the actor she was when taking the pictures, but not everyone approved of the side hustle: “I remember taking shots of a particularly dapper older gentleman who spotted my flash, ran after me and threw a bag of french fries at my head.”

Keaton’s unnamed portraits of Tinseltown were another facet of her obsession with the overlooked, the understudied, the forgotten. But really, she was interested in everything. One chapter in Saved is devoted to “Clinical Diagnoses of Diseases of the Mouth”, with images from a particularly gruesome flea-market find.

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Keaton’s other image-led books (she also wrote two memoirs) are testament to those wide range of interests and predilections. There is Fashion First (2024) with a foreword by Ralph Lauren; a personal exploration of her fashion and clothing choices. Her love of architecture and design is reflected in California Romantica (2008), an assortment of photos which celebrate the stucco walls, clay tile roofs and prominent arches of the California Mission and Spanish Colonial Revival styles (introduced by DJ Waldie). House (2012) details neglected farmhouses and crumbling warehouses, whereas The House That Pinterest Built (2017) evaluated how she planned her entire home using the online image board, as well as offering interiors tips for readers.

Keaton was also a champion of the unsung talents of others. When she acquired a 40-year-old box of 20,000 negatives which turned out to be the work of a commercial photographer in Fort Worth – Bill Wood – Keaton curated them into a book (Bill Wood’s Business, published in 2008) and an accompanying exhibition to safeguard the quirks and minutiae of American social and cultural life. Afterwards, she donated the lot to the International Center of Photography.

In Dead of Night (2021), Keaton and photographer Nick Reid edited a book of eerie pictures of car crashes taken by a county coroner called Robert H Boltz (Keaton had bought his archive). Chiaroscuro images with an eldritch quality, they are an unsettling combination of violence and silence.

And Keaton supplied a foreword for a collection of Ron Galella’s – the notorious pioneer of US paparazzi culture – prints. “Every person featured in this book had a relationship with Ron Galella,” she wrote. “Some denied it.”

She was a zealous and steadfast preservationist of artistic and cultural achievement, whether that be her troubled brother’s writing and photographs (published in Brother & Sister, 2020), or when sitting for two decades on the board of the LA Conservancy. (Keaton helped to save two Frank Lloyd Wright homes, one of which she lived in; and attempted to protect the Los Angeles Ambassador Hotel, one of her subjects in Reservations, and the location of Robert F Kennedy’s assassination).

Since her death last week, the entertainment industry has paid homage to Keaton as a brilliant actor and fashion icon – correct – but her legacy should also include her influence in the domains of visual art, design and architecture. Especially, as the New Yorker critic and Keaton’s friend Janet Malcolm once described it, the “mordant melancholy” of the Rolleiflex images Keaton produced. In 2008, when presented with the Trustee award by the International Center of Photography, Keaton explained her raison d’être for documenting, collecting, curating: “So much is forgotten and destroyed in our culture. We all long to be remembered.”