Since the late 1950s David Hurn has photographed people in the act of reading. On Reading brings these images together for the first time and is forty years in the making. The photographs were captured in cafes and bars, at dog shows and railway stations, strip clubs and museums, on the seaside and on film sets, in parks and on the street—wherever Hurn found someone absorbed in a page. The project has a clear point of origin: in September 1983 Hurn was invited, with ninety-nine other photographers from around the world, on the midnight-to-midnight twenty-four-hour vigil to photograph London that resulted in the book A Day in the Life of London. Among the visiting guests was his hero André Kertész, then 89; Hurn offered to look after him in Hyde Park, and watched the older photographer return repeatedly to figures reading on benches. Kertész's own classic body of work On Reading became Hurn's quiet companion across decades, his images here written in the same affectionate tradition: people unaware, alone with a book, perfectly themselves.