Reading Room

Earlier today I was at the Mid-Manhattan Library and noticed an interesting installation on the third floor, in which a number of postcard-size photos are pinned to about six or seven horizontal wood strips. It turned out to be Reading Room: A Catalog of New York City's Branch Libraries by photographer Elizabeth Felicella.


[Reading Room | image from NYPL Art and Picture Collections Facebook page]

From the project page:

Reading Room is a large-scale photographic mural depicting the interiors and exteriors of The New York Public Library’s 86 neighborhood libraries. The mural is composed of individual photos selected from Felicella's larger project, also titled Reading Room that catalogs all of the city’s branch libraries. Reading Room pays tribute to the city's libraries as an invaluable public resource while also proposing that the architecture of the libraries be read as a collection in itself, a time-line of changing ideas over the last century about design, building, the places we share, the ways we read, and our aspirations as a city and a society.