On loneliness - a portrait project

A portrait photography project to destigmatise talking about loneliness - what's been described as becoming the defining emotion of the 21st Century.

“Loneliness is a very special place” - Brian Wilson

Why is loneliness so hard to talk about, when so many of us feel it?

With the World Health Organisation declaring loneliness a 'global public health concern' in 2023, prominent academics from Hannah Arendt to Noreena Hertz have also linked it to the growth of populism and radicalisation. Hertz has even described it as 'becoming the defining emotion of the 21st Century'.

Yet although loneliness is a universal emotion, which most of us will feel at some point in our lives, many of us keep it hidden from others. We feel ashamed, like there must be something wrong with us, and fear that other people will shrink from us if share our feelings with them.  

The irony is, as Olivia Laing writes in The Lonely City: “so much of the pain of loneliness is due to concealment.”

It needn't be so. 

I have my own reasons for feeling lonely sometimes: I’m single, I live alone, and I have a chronic health condition that limits my energy. And despite living in a wonderful community with close friends nearby, I sometimes feel like I live in some kind of  liminal space. Like there’s a more vivid, ‘real’ world that I can manage to break into sometimes, but that too often feels out of reach.

But over the course of the past year I’ve had more first-hand insight into the many different dimensions and nuances of loneliness than I could ever have imagined.

In 2023 I was commissioned by the internationally renowned School of Life to make a portrait photography book about loneliness. Through 50 portraits accompanied by written testimonials, the book will shine a gentle light on loneliness.

In the course of meeting people from all walks of life and of all ages for this book, I’ve realised that not only is loneliness nothing to be ashamed of, it’s partly what defines us as human. We know we are all mortal (even though we do our utmost to forget this) and that each of us will die alone.

I've also realised that many of us are too isolated, thanks to the demise of civic spaces, our smartphone addiction, the cost of living crisis, the lingering effects of Covid...I could go on.

But it's not just about social isolation. It's also about being heard.

The process of creating portraits of the project participants has involved me asking them open-ended questions on loneliness, and on so many occasions people have wanted to keep talking.

Conversations have been wide-ranging: covering traumatic childhoods, psychotic episodes, workplace bullying, ill health and disability, bereavement, empty marriages, the difficulty of fitting in to new cultures, or just shyness.

A couple of people said they'd never spoken to anyone about what they'd shared with me. Most of them seemed grateful to have had the space to express themselves deeply.

And it hasn't all been one-sided. I have found that the act of deeply listening to someone else’s pain has taken me out of myself. It has felt healing, even to the extent that sometimes I felt like the boundaries between 'me, myself and I', and ‘the other’, have become far less clear.

A quote I stumbled across online  attributed to Vera Nazarian sums this up perfectly: 

“To be alone with yourself is to be alone. To be in the company of others is to be alone together. “The only time you are not alone is when you forget yourself and reach out in love - the lines of self blur, and just for a wild, flickering moment, you experience the miracle of other.”

I recently learned that this experience is sometimes referred to by philosophers and psychotherapists as the ‘I - thou’ connection. As the British psychotherapist Julia Samuel describes it, it’s “those transcendent moments of connection when the ‘I’ and the ‘thou’ are as one.”

Surely that must be the exact opposite of loneliness. 

So this project has several layers.

Photographs and accompanying testimonials provide the viewer/reader with insights into human experiences and emotions that are often kept hidden, and the comfort that they are not alone in their own feelings of loneliness.

For participants in the project, it has offered the chance to be heard and to be understood - not just by me, but all viewers and readers of their stories, into the future.

For me, it's offered the chance to experience the healing power of truly listening. And it's given me the gift of being able to make myself, and what I care about, heard and understood.

So although I have finished work on the book, I am continuing with my project, self-funded for now. 

Because as Olivia Laing says: “I’ve come to believe that loneliness is by no means a wholly worthless experience, but rather one that cuts right through to the heart of what we value and what we need.”