It’s no secret that our contemporary milieu of social media, smartphone notifications and snappy soundbites has severely compromised our ability to focus on longer, deeper texts. And yet allowing oneself to be engrossed in a book – or a magazine or newspaper – remains one of the best ways of shutting out the distractions of the outside world and re-capturing our age-old capacity to mono-task.
As a photographer, there is something delicately beautiful about capturing people reading. Not only does the activity transcend class, gender, race and other social barriers, the sudden self-awareness that many subjects exhibit when approached by someone with a camera evaporates with readers. They are blissfully unaware of the world around them, submerged in that magical realm where the written word meets the human imagination…
