The Feeling of Solitude: 40 Photos that Evoke a Sense of Isolation

“Was this what it was to be an explorer? An adventurer? To gulp this sleeping silence. To be so unutterably alone with it, to wade in it, to find it rising like a tide from the floors, lowering itself from the mouldering caverns of high domes, filling the corridors as though with something palpable?”
– Gormenghast, Mervyn Peake

Those who wield a camera are no strangers to the company of solitude. It arises both as a subject of study – finding a muse in the solitary figure or the desolate urban street – and as a way of being – often a necessity born out of the demands of the job. I recently came across an essay by photojournalist Thomas Hoepker that explores the work of several iconic photographers who deal with the themes of loneliness and isolation. Their work evokes a sense of alienation and longing, but also depicts the freedom and feeling of quiet joy that solitude can bring. Take Saul Leiter’s layered fragments of city life, for instance, or Dave Heath’s emotionally charged close ups of anonymous strangers lost in detached contemplation.

These photographs often possess a haunting quality, imparting an impression of loneliness or vague melancholy in the viewer. These kinds of images – for instance, an old, worn woman sitting dejectedly on a stoop – may offer a glimpse into the human psyche, a window into the world of a stranger. Others, like a photo of a deserted city block or a graffitied, crumbling facade, while still evoking a sense of loneliness, may symbolize poverty and other social ills, or speak to the aftershocks of war or natural disaster.

Leiter suggests that “since a viewer can easily relate to the lone, pensive figure, a photograph is open to the interpretations or projections of its audience.” Indeed, it is hard to stare into the face of another lonely soul and not wonder what their story might be. And this is what photography, and art more broadly, should do: engage the viewer, coax the gaze to linger and the mind to turn on questions of meaning and significance.

For me, a dark, moody scene, perhaps of a mist shrouded tree or an atmospheric landscape, suggests a feeling of the mysterious or wistful and the state of being alone at the edge of the unknown, of possibilities. More so than shots of people, these are the kinds of moments that I love capturing. But when my camera does find a person in its cross hairs, it’s usually a lone soul, furtively captured as he or she recedes from my hiding place. Most of the time I never see their face, and they certainly never see mine. They stay a distant, anonymous figure, all the more open to interpretation and projection. In what follows, I have put together a selection of such images taken while on my travels – my own homage to the lonesome beauty of isolation.