Loneliness

Silhouette of a person walking up stairs in front of large windows with cloudy sky visible outside.
A person’s shadow cast on the ground inside an abandoned building with graffiti-covered walls, illuminated by sunlight coming through openings in the ceiling and walls.
A man standing inside a wooden frame on a beach, overlooking the ocean, in black and white.
A person taking a photograph of their reflection in a mirror in a modern, minimalist interior with angular walls and soft lighting.
A blurry person running across a dry, grassy landscape with two large, concrete T-shaped structures in the background. The scene is hazy and appears to be in a desolate area.
Black and white photo of an open barn door leading outside to a landscape with grass and bushes.
A foggy landscape with bushes and trees in the foreground, and a tall, blurred statue or figure in the distance surrounded by mist.
A black-and-white photograph of a reflection on a glass window showing a person and a landscape with trees outside. The person appears to be holding a patterned textile.
A black and white photo of a small church with a steeple topped with a cross, beside a leafless tree, with foggy landscape in the background.
A black and white landscape of a hillside with trees and a distant mountain, under a sky with a crescent moon.
An outdoor scene at sunset with a sofa and cushions on a dirt ground, against a background of trees and a colorful sky with clouds.
A barren, star-shaped salt flat with numerous black wooden sticks embedded in the surface, creating shadows on the ground.

Loneliness is a strange ache—the peculiar pain of feeling severed from others while moving among them. Solitude is not this. Solitude is what allows us to introspect, to attune ourselves to nature's quiet rhythms. In any case, we cannot endure prolonged separation from our own kind—we are, but we cease to exist in some essential way when we live in isolation. To live apart is to risk a kind of ontological erasure—we require witness; our very existence seems contingent upon reflection in another's consciousness.

I find myself suspended between two contradictory truths: the profound peace I discover in solitude, usually in nature, and the sharp anxiety of loneliness, especially in a city, where we exist neither in solitude nor in genuine connection.

These photographs, taken in California, attempt to capture that void: the enormous emptiness that opens in the human soul when human connection fails.