[Winter 2026]
Sovereign Subjects
by Cheryl Simon
[EXCERPT]
I keep a photograph on my bookshelf of my mother reading. In the snapshot, likely taken by my father sometime before I was born, my mother is sitting in an armchair in the living room with her eyes fixed on a newspaper opened on her lap. Concentration rapt, unaware of camera and photographer, she seems to exist in a world apart, transported elsewhere by the words on the page. For me, the picture has deep sentimental value, it touches me, giving rise to thoughts about the vast and unknowable dimensions of my mother’s inner life. Apropos of its placement on my bookshelf, it also invites others to contemplate what it means to read.
The collection of pictures that populate Lady Readers encourage similar reflection. These three-hundred-plus found photographs compiled over a twelve-year period by the writer, curator, and editor Sara Knelman hail from different periods throughout the history of photography and appear to have been made to serve different ends. Including stereographs and ambrotypes, silver gelatin prints, press prints, and snapshots – pictures made by amateurs capturing ephemeral instants of private life and by professionals making more calculated representations for public use in news stories and postcard illustrations, public service, editorial content, and marketing campaigns – the ladies in this assemblage have read across very nearly the entire spectrum of photographic times and genres.
[…]
[ Complete issue, in print and digital version, available here: Ciel variable 131 – Collecting ]
[ Complete article in digital version available here: Sovereign Subjects]
Sara Knelman is a writer, curator, and educator. She has held executive and curatorial positions at major galleries, including curator of contemporary art at the Art Gallery of Hamilton, and was publisher of C Magazine. She has written about contemporary art and photography for 1000 Words, Aperture, Canadian Art, Frieze, Prefix Photo, and Source: The Photographic Review, and contributed to numerous books. She lives in Toronto.
saraknelman.com
Cheryl Simon is an academic and writer whose current research interests include archival and assemblage art and theories and forensic and investigative aesthetics. She teaches in the MFAStudio Arts program at Concordia University in Montreal.