David Hurn’s On Reading gathers nearly seven decades of photographs devoted to a deceptively ordinary act: people absorbed in reading. Begun in the late 1950s, the project moves through cafés, bars, railway stations, museums, parks, streets, seaside locations and film sets. Its subjects read books and magazines, and later consult mobile phones; the medium changes, but the visible condition of concentration remains.

Hurn’s eye is attentive to the moment in which public life briefly becomes private. A reader pauses, withdraws, or settles into a temporary interior space, even while surrounded by strangers. The photographs range from Wales and Europe to Qatar, the United States and New Zealand, giving the book a broad geographic register without diluting its human scale. Alongside observations made in passing are commissioned images from Hurn’s professional life, including The Beatles on the set of A Hard Day’s Night, a scene at Queen Charlotte’s debutante ball, and photographs made at Hay Festivals.

The book also carries a precise photographic inheritance. Hurn conceived it in response to André Kertész’s 1971 volume of the same title, after meeting Kertész during the 1983 project A Day in the Life London and receiving permission to remake the work at the age of 89. On Reading is therefore both an independent sequence and a considered act of continuation: an established documentary photographer returning to a formative idea and testing its persistence across time, places and generations.

Published by RRB Photobooks in 2024, this 64-page hardcover Special Edition gives a concise form to a body of work forty years in the making. Its collector’s interest lies not in novelty alone, but in the coherence of its subject, the reach of its chronology, and the dialogue it establishes with Kertész. Hurn turns a familiar gesture into a sustained meditation on attention, solitude and the shared spaces of everyday life.