Shared isolation

My Photo scholarship 2010 entry

Switzerland | Friday, August 20, 2010 | 5 photos

I’m currently interning with an international organization in Geneva, a city I’d never visited before and where I didn’t speak the language. The sense of arrival in a new place can be exciting or alienating, depending on how you approach it. Normally my way is to try and get to grips with the place as quickly as possible by diving in at the deep end, exploring, interacting and photographing, but I decided to try a different tack here and actually exploit the sense of isolation I felt at times by making it part of the photographs I was taking.

As I went about Geneva photographing the things I saw I incorporated people but only as small, anonymous features, often lost or hopelessly dwarfed by the environments they inhabited, and distant from the viewer. Like many photographers my interest is in understanding people, myself included, and transmitting shared experiences. We all experience similar responses to circumstances, whether it be the sensation of aloneness in a strange place, or the sense of fear that accompanies an unknown future. In the long term I hope to develop a career in humanitarian and development photography, supporting the work of international organizations and NGO’s by underlining their importance in the photos I take.