“I would say that if love belongs to the poet, and fear to the novelist, then loneliness belongs to the photographer.
To be a photographer is to willingly enter the world of the lonely, because it is an artistic exercise in invisibility … the person with the camera is not hiding but receding. He is willfully removing himself from the slipstream of life; he is making himself into a constant witness, someone who lives to see the lives of others, not to be seen himself.
Writing is often assumed to be the loneliest profession, but solitude should not be confused for loneliness: one is a condition we choose, the other is a condition that is forced upon us.
A writer creates a world, and he is the ruler of it; the photographer moves through the world, our world, hoping for anonymity, hoping he is able to humble himself enough to see and record what the rest of us—in our noisy perambulations, in our requests to be heard—are too present to our own selves to ever see. To practice this art requires first a commitment to self-erasure.
It is also why so many great photographs concern loneliness.”
Hanya Yanagihara (author of “A Little Life” and “The People in the Trees”).
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