Looking Back

Capturing the Reading Subject, from the Bible to the Smartphone

We are very happy to publish, as the next installment in our ongoing series on “The Future of Reading”, this most lucid examination of some key moments in the history of representations of reading in the visual arts. It comes to us from Peter Schmidt, a New York-based essayist and critic who has thought very hard about the human consequences of recent transformations in the way we direct our attention, or allow our attention to be directed, and about the political and economic causes of these transformations. Here, he does something we ourselves never would have thought to try: to trace these transformations, particularly as they pertain to our habits of literacy, by shifting his own focus to the visual arts, to photography and painting, in order to see what these might have to tell us about reading. He is right to do so, for the histories of our various representations are all thoroughly intertwined, and if we are to hope to make any real sense of our current crisis of attention, we will have to learn to hop, as Peter does, across epochs and art-forms, gracefully. —The Hinternet

Here’s a thought experiment. Imagine there is, at this very moment, a hidden camera in your vicinity, and that its lens is fixed on you. Now ask yourself: What does this camera see?

Not much. A person bent over a screen. A minute flicker of the pupils as your gaze hops from word to word to word. Foot tapping? Maybe. Eyebrows furrowing? Possibly. But on the whole reading provides little in the way of photographic spectacle. If the camera were to take a picture of this scene, a viewer might wonder what’s going on in that head of yours. But they could only wonder.

It’s the wondering that gives this image its power. There you sit, reading. The parts that make up the situation —text, reader— are simple enough, but the content of the situation, the nature of what exactly is happening between person and paragraph, remains inscrutable. The photo gestures to invisible activity in your private world but requires the photo’s observer to imagine that activity in a private world of their own.

The effect is one of art tracing its own edges: the photograph calls forth the very thing that it fails to depict — the inside of the mind; what you might call interior life. This is useful, since one’s own inner life can be pretty hard to assess. Photographs like this one provide a needed remove. In the best of cases, they teach us how to look back at ourselves, and see what, exactly, is changing: the status of reading, the status of images, and the status of interiority itself.

In an untitled photo (Eighth Street, New York City, June 16, 1963), by the Hungarian photographer André Kertész, tarpaper roofs, gutters, and parapets converge under a flat noonday sun. The scene is unmistakably urban, though it is urban life’s private face: a back-window city of courtyards and rooftops hidden from the street.

But see: in the upper right-hand corner, behind the flower box propped on the roof’s edge, sits a figure, taking sun. It wears dark glasses, and a curly head of hair made pointillist by the light. Nearly all of the person, including obvious signs of gender, is elided. What remains are the edge of one smooth, straight arm, and the left side of a face. A gaze cast downward into a space behind the sun-warmed parapet. We cannot see what they are looking at. But we do not need to see, because we already know: they are reading.

How do we know? For one thing, because this is the fifty-fourth image in On Reading, Kertész’s beloved photo collection of bookish snapshots over nearly six decades. Kertész’s father was a Budapest bookseller, and his interest in the attentional powers of text runs through his long and distinguished career as a photojournalist, which took him from Hungary to Paris and New York and as far as Tokyo. On Reading chronicles an urbanizing twentieth century, in which moments of private absorption in semi-public spaces —windows, park benches, street corners, rooftops— are so commonplace as to be nearly trivial. It is Kertész’s eye, and his quick instinct, that draw these moments out from the forward tilt of modern life and reveals them to be entirely self-contained — quiet, interminable worlds unto themselves.

What distinguishes the above image from the rest in the collection is that it is the only one where we do not see what the reader is looking at. The object of their attention, and the center of the action, so to speak, are obscured by the edge of the roof. But we are sure there is a book in those hands, and not only because the collection’s title tells us so. It is all in the posture: bent neck, downward gaze, quiet expression. This is a body at attention. And the setting is a historical moment and a social context where the relation of text to bodies at attention is so secure that the context serves to complete the scene. We don’t need to see the book. We know it’s there.

Steve McCurry likewise has a collection entitled On Reading (in homage to Kertész), but his camera looks onto a world where reading’s position is no longer quite so reliable. Like Kertész, McCurry is a celebrated photojournalist. His portrait of a young, green-eyed Afghan woman is perhaps the most famous in the distinguished pantheon of National Geographic cover photos. McCurry is clearly indebted to Kertész, but his style is different, and so is his historical moment. Where Kertész is an ambling flâneur with a generous eye for the mundane, McCurry is a swashbuckler reporting from the receding edges of a globalized world. McCurry’s digital images are crisper than Kertész’s. He shoots in digital color, in contrast with Kertész’s black-and-white film. And while a few of McCurry’s images verge on the exquisite ambiguity of Kertész’s, most of them look, well, like the cover of a National Geographic: crisp, clear, and immediately compelling. Kertész’s photographs are private murmurs; McCurry’s are headlines.

Consider the following undated photograph, Bakong Temple, Roluos, Cambodia:

Two young monks sit, reading, atop a stone slab in a verdant jungle clearing. In the background are crumbling temple walls and an explosion of vegetation from chinks in the rain-stained stones. The rightmost monk seems absorbed in the text, while his partner looks on. In a scene of green and orange and dark greys, the paper in their hands mirrors the white sky. At the right-hand edge of the image stands an old and gnarled tree.

The focal center of the image is the pair of reading monks. Their middle-ground position between the ancient tree and the ancient temple situates them outside of the present. We are to believe that monks have been sitting here for centuries, absorbed in their studies. Nothing particularizes the monks themselves, nor the moment in which they have been captured. This indeterminacy suggests that the central concern of the image is not the monks at all, nor the jungle, but the aura of timelessness that they represent.

McCurry’s photograph is not a snapshot of daily life. It is a snapshot of eternity — the kind of eternity that Western photographers often find when they pack their bags and head east. This mythologizing tradition has always been woven through with the impending eradication of its objects by the forces of colonialism and globalization. Indeed, McCurry’s images shine brightest when they show reading as a strange and remote practice, a ritual shimmering with its imminent disappearance. Our saffron-clad readers gleam, already, with the crepuscular light of distant memory. So, too, does reading — a practice made all the more enchanting by its proximity to oblivion.

McCurry’s collection was published in 2016. By that point, reading was an endangered act. But nothing really disappears. It just goes somewhere else, or changes shape. Mass-market titans of textual culture like Borders Bookstore may have gone bankrupt in 2011, and literacy rates may be plummeting still, but the same, seemingly timeless, figure of the face downturned toward text endures.

We can find it in the work of Dafydd Jones, who has worked the high-heel and cocktail beat as a society photographer for magazines like Tatler, Vanity Fair, and Vogue since the 1980s. In 2008, Jones was so struck by the ways that mobile phones had transformed social life that he decided to document the shift in earnest. His collection, Screen Time, picks up where McCurry left off. Jones’s images move reading from Kertész’s makeshift getaways or McCurry’s distant dispatches and places it right in the middle of the party.

Jones’s compositions look mostly like normal party shots: the frames are full of bodies facing each other in twos or threes, at wedding tables or by the bar. While Kertész’s work shows that reading has always been an act of withdrawal from sociality, Jones shows a withdrawal so segmented and frictionless that it leaves the body strangely in place. These readers are readers from the neck up only.

Tramp, London 2011 has all the elements of a striking composition: the platinum-haired vamp peering back over her shoulder (see the hand on her hip), the craggy older man (is that Ronnie Wood of the Rolling Stones?), and the brunette, perfectly centered, with an oversized bow about her collar. The situation is rich for a play of gazes — who’s looking where? Who wants what? Instead, the central woman’s eyes are drawn down toward her screen, as are the eyes of the man beside her. Once again, we viewers are left wondering what it is they are looking at.

But we don’t wonder that hard. Not really. Because we know that the price of this newly frictionless access to text is text that doesn’t demand much of its reader or give much in return. In all likelihood, Jones’s subjects are reading not text but texts — short messages, possibly sent by someone at the same event, signifying, if not nothing, still not enough to require leaving the club. We can assume no one is reading Madame Bovary while waiting for their martini. It’s even possible that these people are looking at pictures — Instagram was launched in 2010, just before this photo was taken — in which case the scope of reading is reduced further, to captions, to usernames, to single, hashtagged words.

Jones frames his project as a crusade against smartphone “addiction”. This is a worthy cause, and addiction is a good word to describe the problem. Jones’s emphasis is on how smartphones fragment our weddings and our nights out — in other words, our social world. He does not comment on the changes to our private, internal lives. And these changes are there to see: the act of reading, of absorption, has been tugged out of isolation into the center of the fray, there to contend with the DJ, the hors d’oeuvres, and the hottie making eyes across the room.

Another difference is that these internal worlds are no longer private. We know now that every swipe and tap and lingering look of Jones’s readers is being recorded, measured, and optimized to maximize screen time. This, then, is the real transformation, of which Jones’s addiction diagnosis is merely a symptom: that absorption, which used to represent a secret inner life, has been sneakily transfigured into a siphon by which our native curiosity is sucked away and sold. Where once we were rapt, now we are gift-wrapped. The text is reading us.

In Absorption and Theatricality: Painting and Beholder in the Age of Diderot (1976), critic Michael Fried tells the story of how painting’s ability to achieve “the supreme fiction of the beholder’s nonexistence” became a matter of serious concern in 18th-century France. In the case of one exemplary work, Jean-Baptiste Greuze’s La Lecture de la Bible (1755), the depiction of a common family’s after-dinner recitation sent viewers into states of rapture. Why? Fried argues that the work’s virtuosic appeal was in “its persuasive representation of a particular state or condition… of rapt attention.” Note the grandmother, marvelled one contemporary commenter — see how she “restrains the little rogue” without turning her attention from the reading. “What a painter! What a composer!” Fried drew on this instance and many others as evidence of shifting tastes and standards in the eighteenth century: from works of theatricality, where the subject of the painting is performing for, and thus calling attention to, the viewer, to works of absorption, where the subject is so attentive to an object within the painting that the viewer might as well not be there.

Photographs of reading — at least, the convincing ones — fall in the latter category of work. But the terms of Fried’s judgment require revision. These days, most absorption happens on smartphones. And whenever phones are involved, there is always a beholder, and it is always watching us with an eye for profit. Reading silently is no longer a guarantee of private experience.

In this light, images of readers from Jean-Baptiste Greuze’s paintings to Dafydd Jones’s photographs serve a new function. They direct our attention to the shifting borders of our interiority, and the incursion upon our inner lives by market forces. They raise questions about our relationships to the objects we look at. Do we need those objects? Do those objects need us? This can become a normative conversation about which objects we look at — to some sensibilities, a book of poems may be better than an iPad. But that merely displaces a historical question into the realm of individual choice. The fact is that the terms of visibility, attention, and surveillance have changed forever. The world of things looks back at us in ways that it didn’t before.

Which brings us back to the scenario at the beginning of this essay. It’s not so far-fetched to imagine that there is a camera on you right now. You’re probably holding it. In which case, you might take a moment to think about what parts of you it cannot see.

And here these curious photographs help us. They depict the shifting borders of that which cannot be depicted. They gesture to that interior space (call it the soul?) that cannot be captured — at least, not perfectly. Not yet. This is a precious zone, and it grows more precious by the day. Its edges are, you might say, a last line of defense. And it is besieged. But the fact that photographs —and, by extension, cameras— can assist us in these moments is proof that every technology can be turned on itself, again and again and again. This turning (a revolution, in other words) can return our tools to uses that serve us. They can make surveillance an occasion for reflection. This requires courage, and it requires care. One rotation too many and you’re back where you started, or worse.

Peter Schmidt is the Program Director at the Strother School of Radical Attention. He writes for Radicle Weft.

Photo information:

[IMAGE 1]
Title: Untitled
Year: 1963
André Kertész
© The Estate of André Kertész / Higher Pictures
(Detailed in the index: Eighth Street, New York City. June 16, 1963.)

[IMAGE 2]
Title: Bakong Temple, Roluos, Cambodia
Year: not given
Steve McCurry
© Phaidon Press Limited

[IMAGE 3]
Title: Tramp, London 2011
Year: 2011
Dafydd Jones
© Circa Press Limited and Dafydd Jones

[IMAGE 4]
Title: La Lecture de la Bible (Un père de famille qui lit la Bible à ses enfants)
Year: 1755
Jean-Baptiste Greuze
Louvre Museum