Solitude

Eleven portraits of people who live alone by choice, each made in a single sitting, in their own rooms, with whatever light the day offered.

I asked each subject for one hour and one room. No lights, no assistant, no second visit. What I wanted was the version of a person that appears when the performance of company is set down.

One hour, one room

The constraint did most of the work. An hour is long enough to run out of things to say and short enough that nobody relaxes into a pose, and the pictures I kept almost all come from the last fifteen minutes.

Solitude is not the absence of other people. It is a particular kind of attention that only becomes visible once the room goes quiet.

The series was published in the spring issue of a photography quarterly and has since travelled to two group exhibitions.