aytuğ üngör is an unknown photographer, videographer, short-filmmaker and future unemployed artist. "arkadaş meşhuru" is his blog.
The women reading book is interestingly popular subject in the art history. It’s a nice brain gym to think about that why women are so worth observing while they are reading book.
Women literacy was a radical idea before 18th century. In the age after French Revolution, they began to carry books in their pockets. This significant social change is inevitable to attract the attention of contemporaries, especially male ones. There is no doubt that artists had to say something about this phenomenon.
Stefan Bollmann in his spectacular book Women Who Read Are Dangerous tells that “reading is an act of friendly isolation. When we are reading, we make ourselves unapproachable in a tactful way. Perhaps that is exactly what has interested painters for so long portrayal of readers: showing people in a state of deepest intimacy not intended for outsiders.”
That kind of moment of intimacy is the part what is interested me the most in those paintings as well. The difference between these paintings and other depictions of women in art is that model’s forgetting the observer completely. She is absorbed in her book and forgets all of her surroundings. She is in front of us with all her passion, fear, hope or her melancholy. She doesn’t answer back the look of painter or viewer. She doesn’t care of us. She creates a space; a safe space, between her and us and she is free what she wants to do or wants to be there.
Even though the woman who reads book reveals a glimpse of her character actually that moment we witness is full with the blanks to fill.
In the foreword of Bollmann’s book, Karen Joy Fowler notices the woman who reads might be having trouble concentrating, or she might be spellbound. She might be escaping from boredom into a frothy romantic comedy. She might be reading a Russian novel, a Japanese, assuring herself that others have also had their troubles. She might be pitting her wits against a world-famous detective. She might just need a good cry. Or she might be experiencing some transformation so profound that she will never be quite the same again. At the very moment we see her, the scales might be falling from her eyes. What’s really going on, then, the important part of the picture, remains invisible.
This unrevealed part of the “picture” is the other thing what I like too much about these paintings. I wonder what the woman reads as much as Fowler. It’s like trying to see the title of the book which belongs to a stranger whom I sit next to in bus or an underground. This curiosity, while we are watching these paintings, leads us the body language of the woman and the place she reads her book. Sometimes a gesture or an element of the decoration, even choice of a light condition gives some clue about what that woman reads.
To sum up, increasing the number of literate women triggered proliferation of representations of the women reading book in 17th century. However even today the image of woman as reader quite powerful and to be continued to reproducing not only as paintings, as photograph or as a film scene. I think, this image lives until the death of women’s passion of reading.
i didn’t get any permission to shoot or publish this video. i hope the young woman in the video don’t get angry with me if she sees this video someday. i want her to know i’m not a pervert. i am just an artist trying to bring a new perspective to a subject which is so popular in the art history.
cover picture: the blue dress by miss catherine gulley
