Lonely Made Visible

In The New Yorker, Hanya Yanagihara situates photography among the arts: “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 photographer isn’t in the frame: “To practice this art requires first a commitment to self-erasure.” And what is in the frame of the best photographs, “the ones we linger on longest” is what is most often invisible, “the overlooked and underloved.”

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