Holding vast landscapes of thought in your hand, being brave enough to enter. A reflected journey. This photographs tells me what being a reader is.
It was shot by Carolyn Drake as part of her Lubavitch series issued in the National Geographic some years ago.
Sean O’Hagan wrote a great article on Diane Arbus for the Guardian to commemorate the ever evasive American photographer on the 40th anniversary of her death.
Arbus may have felt an enormous empathy with the people she photographed, but she was not one of them, however much she identified with their outsider status. She had her own troubles, but they were of a different order. The work she left behind remains powerful not just because of its dark formal beauty or its stark vision, but because it asks questions of the viewer about the limits of looking, about the vicariousness and predatory nature of photography, and about our complicity in all of this.
Recently published by independent Indian publisher Tara Books, I for Imagine is perhaps the most striking alphabet book around.
It journeys into the gaze of Marc Riboud, a contemporary French photographer best known for his extensive photographic reports on the East, as well as for being the author of one of the most celebrated anti-war pictures.
We learn the letters of the alphabet as children. We discover the technicalities of their mechanism. But we never cease to learn about the sounds of their clockwork, the action of words, their ways of shaping the world. We continually explore the world anew through the acquisition of fresh – I will borrow this word from Baudelaire – correspodences.
A couple of years ago, the Guardian website featured some beautiful photographs of people reading taken by the celebrated Hungarian photographer André Kertész. The pictures were taken in a period of over fifty years and were included in the photographer’s seminal work On Reading.
The intimacy of these solitary portraits brings to my mind a beautiful poem by Wallace Stevens celebrating the delicate relationship between a book and its reader.
The house was quiet and the world was calm.
The reader became the book; and summer night
Was like the conscious being of the book.
The house was quiet and the world was calm.
The words were spoken as if there was no book,
Except that the reader leaned above the page,
Wanted to lean, wanted much most to be
The scholar to whom the book is true, to whom
The summer night is like a perfection of thought.
The house was quiet because it had to be.
The quiet was part of the meaning, part of the mind:
The access of perfection to the page.
And the world was calm. The truth in a calm world,
In which there is no other meaning, itself
Is calm, itself is summer and night, itself
Is the reader leaning late and reading there.