Culture
Picturing the Library as Public Space
Elizabeth Felicella spent five years documenting how libraries reflect and shape their communities and times.
Elizabeth Felicella’s photographs of New York’s public libraries are empty of people, but full of traces of them. She captures ghosts of letters and fingerprints on chalkboards, and doodles at the base of pencil sharpeners. Paper-wrapped book spines wait for patrons to collect them. There are folded newspapers, squiggles of electronics cords, and chairs pushed back from desks.
Felicella, an architectural photographer, spent five years documenting all of New York’s 210 public library branches. The images are now collected in an exhibition, “Reading Room: A Catalog of New York City’s Branch Libraries,” on view at the Center for Architecture.