The Sweet Art of Being Alone

The Solitude of the Street Photographer & Giving Oneself Up to the Moment

Lately I have been having memories softly fading in and out of my mind, tender memories of when I first moved to New York City and started street photography. These memories are tinged with elation, wonder, and loneliness. The kind of loneliness that is felt sitting on a crowded train, surrounded by people, all of them strangers, inaccessible to me. It was loneliness, paired with a curiosity about the world around me that brought me to pick up a camera 10 years ago. In this post I will speak about loneliness (or aloneness) in a particular way - as nourishment, as something essential not just for an artist and their creation, but for all people.

What attracted me to street photography as an art form (instead of painting for example) was the peculiar mix of the photographer spending time alone in a sea of strangers. Painting, writing, sculpting - all of these demand solitude, a total retreat from the outside world and into oneself. Street photography demands one’s wholehearted participation in the world, and one’s complete surrender to the present. It is the sweet art of being alone with the world, exploring it, playing with it, never divorced from it for a single moment.

I have found that my meditation practice echoes my street photography, or does my street photography echo my meditation practice? There have been many writings on the parallels between meditation and street photography. There’s even a book called Zen Camera which creatively combines the principles of Zen Buddhism with developing self-expression in photography as a method of self-discovery. I will write more about the curious parallels between meditation and street photography in a later post. But the description I have heard most often from various photographers (including myself) that aligns street photography with meditation is the importance of giving ourselves up to the moment that is in front of us. If one is distracted on the street - the photograph is gone, the moment is gone. We lament, dust ourselves off, and continue wandering, ears and eyes perked up to the world, ready for that next moment.

When I speak of aloneness, I don’t simply mean being free of others. Aloneness for me is also a willing detachment from distracting technologies, a purposefully created state in which my mind is free to roam, imagine, play. In a world where people seemingly do whatever they can to remain “busy” or “engaged”, we must dare ourselves to be bored. Sit outside, watch the ants scurry about, do nothing. Stare into space and see the magic of the light playing through the trees. Feel the desire to photograph that moment, to make something out of “nothing”. We can only feel the inspiration of the moment if we completely give ourselves up to it.