Recent media reports a surge in reading and buying books due to the pandemic. Feel-good subjects like travel books, romance novels, and fiction, are doing especially well. There’s great interest in children’s books, books about social justice, and how-to books. During the pandemic, people are finding more time to read.

I have been photographing piles of books in my home, including my and my family members’ books. I see these seemingly ordinary stacks as inadvertent sculptures, creating a three-dimensionality that is sometimes orderly, often weighty.

Due to the isolating by-product of the pandemic, I have not been able to photograph other people, a major frustration for a portraitist. So, I’ve expanded on my project by asking others, family, friends, and friends of friends to photograph their stacks of books in their own homes. The participants were invited to write about their book stacks. Some spoke of their relationship to their books, and many expressed sentiments about the pandemic.

This project allows entry into other people’s homes at a time when a visit is desirable, but isolation is a necessary reality. I think of the book stacks with their accompanying short texts as not only portraits of the individuals, but also a portrait of this 21st-century pandemic.

January 2021