"Cities resemble each other if we consider them as the theater of modern life and of anonymity. Specificities become a subtle matter. Anonymity is not a negative thing. More than a loss of individuality, it is a form of the general, of the common. It contributes to the melancholy of the flâneur, but this does not prevent us from seeing either beauty or sensuality."

Beat Streuli, interviewed by Jean François Chevrier, in Lieux communs, figures singulières catalogue, City of Paris Museum of Modern Art, Paris, 1991

For a long time I have been drawn to cityscapes and the weaving of the very textures that make the urban fabric: walls, pavement, windows, artificial light… More recently, I decided to turn my lens toward the people living within those spaces. Subsequently, my attention shifted from defining the metropolis through its architecture to understanding the city as a container for poetic and melancholic isolation.

I first set out to photograph candid street portraits of people engaged in brief moments of introspection in the places where anonymous crowds naturally gather as part of a seemingly collective experience. 

However, roaming the commercial streets and shopping areas, I could no longer find that inner gaze I was expecting. Instead I observed faces turned downward, their absent eyes now locked onto screens. In the city of the twenty-first century the commonly described urban solitude seems to be amplified by the constant urge to look for connection through the digital network. 

Amid crowds rallied under the banner of consumerism I found a contemporary form of solitude, and ultimately the inevitable opacity of the other.