Isolamento

A photobook by Gabriel Esteban, David Marín, Irene Martínez, Claudia García and Juan Fernández-Montes. Link to the work.

With this photobook, our aim was to give visibility to the feeling of loneliness in all its different forms. We based the pictures in two types of pictures: those that we are able to see in daily life and some other pictures that were purposely set and taken. But with both types of pictures, the objective was exactly the same: to represent loneliness and to show that it is not always a bad feeling. You can feel comfortable with yourself even when you are lonely.

In the photobook there are several ideas, questions, or topics that we believed that were interesting and could generate a debate. Each photo has a different meaning and can be interpreted in multiple ways (at the end of the day, it is subjective, so there are not correct and incorrect interpretations or points of view, not even ours) but the topic which we considered most important is the difference between feeling lonely and being lonely.

The photobook is mainly divided in two main parts: first, we have pictures that were taken spontaneously around Madrid (El Retiro, Getafe, etc) to symbolise how loneliness is a feeling that everyone sense at some point of their daily life, even in big cities where you are always surrounded by a lot of people. These photos include a multitude of animals, wildlife, and people that we didn’t know, with their respective lives, concerns, desires… They didn’t realise they were being photographed so we were able to capture the spontaneous loneliness with realism and credibility. To continue with, we rethought the project and changed our style completely, by making photos of our own elaboration taken from a photoshoot that was carried out to include a more direct and clear interpretation of what we consider loneliness. Even though spontaneous photos showed and represented most of the fringes and perceptions we had about loneliness, there were others that we were unable to find in the daily life of the people, so we thought that preparing our own photos will show exactly what we wanted and we could give contrast with the spontaneous photos. Some of these photos imitate famous paintings (the photos are edited to look as familiar as possible to the painting itself) which express loneliness in its maximum splendour.