By Sharanya Gopinathan
I always feel like there’s something quietly powerful about projects that centre women and reading.
We just heard about this new photo project by Carrie Schneider that aims to address the lack of women in literary canon through a series of photographs of women reading works by other women, in their homes.
It’s a thoughtful, personal, meditative series, just like the practice it depicts, and for some reason I feel extra glad that the photos are taken inside their homes, because it makes the project that much lovelier. Schneider says she used long portrait lenses so as not to disturb the women in the photos, and says she spent a long time taking the photographs of each woman so that they would have time to relax and get into the deeply meditative state that reading can take you to.
She says it’s these moments of deep concentration and immersion that she was after, and that’s exactly what you see when you look at the series: women, lost in what they’re reading. While these photos may be staged, Schneider told Slate that it was important to her that these events actually happened. Each portrait is named after the woman in the photo, and the book she was reading in it.
You can see the full project here on her website. It feels soothing, peaceful and beautiful, and reminds us of another reading-based project we loved: Girls at Library, which is part feminist book club, part archive of conversations about books and reading with, well, women who read.