A charming collection of vintage photographs of readers lost in
thought
Where do our minds go when we read books, magazines and letters? Do we
seek an escape, a portal to another world? A secret, a truth, a pleasant
distraction? Voyagers, edited by Melissa Catanese (author of Dive
Dark Dream Slow), consists almost entirely of anonymous black-and-white
snapshots of people in various postures of reading in living rooms, on
beds, at the beach, eating breakfast.
We can't see what these readers are thinking, but Catanese occasionally
breaks the hypnotic typological rhythm to reveal a new photographic
element--a pyramid, a starry night, sunlight blindingly glowing through
a window--giving us brief glimpses of the readers' potential narrative
journeys.
A wordless book with the size and feel of a vintage paperback found at a
flea market, Voyagers reminds us of the power and intimacy of our
relationship to reading devices, and evokes an exotic nostalgia for our
recent predigital culture.
As with Catanese's prior books (Dive Dark Dream Slow [2012], Hells
Hollow, Fallen Monarch [2016]), the images were judiciously
selected from the collection of Peter J. Cohen, a celebrated trove of
more than 20,000 vernacular photographs from the early to mid-20th
century. Gathered from flea markets, dealers and eBay, these images have
been acquired, exhibited and included in a range of major museum
publications.
