IN SAWANT'S ON READING, the act of reading becomes a thread running through the urban fabric—an unexpected stillness within a restless environment. Whether it is a folded newspaper catching morning light, a paperback held like a small shelter, a smartphone glowing in a commuter’s hand, or a tablet angled just so on a café table, each reader creates a momentary refuge in the midst of movement. Sawant’s lens lingers not on spectacle but on these small, concentrated gestures of attention, each one a portal into a private world carried through public space.

     This project inevitably recalls André Kertész’s iconic series On Reading (1971), which traced the universal, unchanging gesture of bowing over a page. Kertész followed readers across decades and continents, discovering in the simple act of opening a book a poetic, nearly spiritual quietness. His readers often appear as solitary figures carved out of shadow and light, framed within architectural geometries that elevate everyday life into a kind of visual haiku.

     Sawant enters the same lineage but brings the tradition forward into a contemporary landscape of multiplied reading platforms. While Kertész’s world was one of printed pages—books, newspapers, letters—Sawant’s encompasses a broader spectrum: the flicker of a phone screen, the reflective surface of a tablet, the creases of a free metro paper, the crisp weight of a magazine yet to be folded. His series captures how reading has changed without losing its essential intimacy. The bodily gestures remain similar—heads inclined, hands curved around an object, posture softened by absorption—but the objects themselves have evolved, each device rewriting how we carry language, news, memory, and imagination.

     Artistically, Sawant embraces these differences instead of smoothing them away. His photographs observe how digital light shapes a face differently than sunlight on a page, how a phone held upright creates a vertical tension distinct from the cradle of an open book, how a newspaper transforms the outline of a seated figure. He shows reading not as nostalgia, nor as a simple continuation of the past, but as a living, adaptive practice embedded in the rhythms of contemporary city life. The reader becomes a node in a larger system of information flow—yet remains, at heart, a solitary presence momentarily removed from the world.

     In this sense, On Reading is less an homage than a dialogue. Sawant honors Kertész’s sensitivity to the quiet dignity of reading, while reframing the act within today’s multiplicity of formats. The result is a portrait of a city where reading survives by shifting shape: sometimes paper, sometimes pixel, always an inward gesture carved out of the outward rush. Sawant reminds us that even in a world of constant distraction, people continue to pause, to lean into words, to carry their own private narratives through the streets. His images ask us to notice these fleeting sanctuaries—these small acts of attention—and to recognize that the desire to read, in all its forms, remains one of the most human ways we inhabit the city.