The magazine of the photo-essay
July 2018 back issue
“A free, really high quality photo-essay magazine. Fabulous!”
Stephen Fry. British actor, writer and film maker
by Lawrence Schwartzwald
The Art of Reading presents the first retrospective of Lawrence Schwartzwald’s
candid images of readers, made between 2001 and 2017. Partly inspired by André
Kertész’s On Reading of 1971, Schwartzwald’s subjects are mostly average New
Yorkers—sunbathers, a bus driver, shoeshine men, subway passengers, denizens
of bookshops and cafes—but also artists, most notably Amy Winehouse at
Manhattan’s now-closed all-night diner Florent.
In 2001 Schwartzwald’s affectionate photo of a New York bookseller reading at his
makeshift sidewalk stand on Columbus Avenue (and inadvertently exposing his
generous buttock cleavage) caused a minor sensation: first published in the New
York Post, it inspired a reporter for the New York Observer to interview the “portly
peddler” in a humorous column titled “Wisecracking on Columbus Avenue” of 2001.
Since then Schwartzwald has sought out his readers of books on paper—mostly
solitary and often incongruous, desperate or vulnerable—who fly in the face of the closure of traditional bookshops and
the surge in e-books, dedicating themselves to what Schwartzwald sees as a vanishing art: the art of reading.
