Picture Book: André Kertész's 'On Reading'

Tonight I've picked up my small white edition of André Kertész's sparsely titled On Reading, first published, lushly, in 1971 and reprinted, not so lushly, in 2008. With photographs as beautiful and intimate as his, it seems only proper to share a few of them with you in our corner.

Perhaps you are already familiar with his work, such as this one of a perfectly poised fork or this one, of a patch of street at the Eiffel Tower's feet; either way, his is a pleasant ouevre to view and view again. I have also enjoyed his pictures of bodies distorted in mirrors, such as this one from 1933, Distortion, making limbs look like statuesque taffy or Henri Moore sculptures or, at times, black-and-white snip-its of Dali paintings. As is the case with ruins, there is an unexpected comfort in seeing the human form warped, disfigured—and still harmonious. In fact, of the Parthenon, Moore wrote the following upon his visit to it in 1951: "In fact I would say that the Parthenon now is probably much more impressive than when it was first made. You feel the spaces much more, and the openings, and the fact that it’s not solid throughout and that the light comes in, makes it into a piece of sculpture and not, as it was before, a building with four external sides. It’s completely spatial now—a different object altogether.” Can you imagine a more hopeful way of considering things in ruin? His sentences make one think the Parthenon's time spent as a temple, cathedral, mosque, and then as an ammunition storehouse was not in vain.

But back to the book. It's exclusively of people of all sorts—gondoliers at rest, girls dressed backstage as fairies, boys dressed as men in overcoats, sunbathers, Trappist monks, Japanese metro-riders—found reading. The pictures were taken between 1915 and 1970 in several locales, among them his native Hungary, Paris, and New York. Reading was one of his lifelong subjects, perhaps in part because his father was a bookseller. Collected here are 23 of these pictures.

One of the curious things I noticed this time going through the book is that at no point am I encouraged to wonder which books are being read. The photographs aren't about the books themselves but about reading. When looking at his pictures, you seem to already know the book being read because the photograph echoes the sensation of reading, when you forget the book because you are so caught up in its sentences—or, in the case of a picture, its forms.

Yet it is natural to be inquisitive about books, to be on the metro ride home and peer over to see what Mr. So-and-so is turned to today. I think Kertész, if he means to say this, is correct: that we should take care to relish and appreciate our neightbor's quiet act of reading (which we would not want to disturb, whether with a too curious hello or nosy sidelong glance). In each frame, the book, and the person holding it, forms a sort of island; and the book seems an extension of the body.

With the advent of Kindle and other such reading devices, perhaps it will be easier to look at the act of reading itself as Kertész did instead of the book—or e-book—and, perhaps, to be less of a Book Snob. For in the world of Kindle, there is only one cover, Amazon's, cloaking every book in plain white plastic.