Fragile

As Jean Baudrillard puts it, New York City is the modern counterpart of ancient Persepolis, Alexandria or Athens that makes it a magnet for tourists, artists, scientists, and so forth. As a quintessential delirious city, New York is comprised of several antagonisms related to class, gender, race and ethnicity, which in turn, have eventually become a source of its diversity. The city is characterized by a plethora of activities, identities, experiences, senses and forms of existence. With its peculiar diversity, skyscrapers, dazzling city lights, famous bridges, black and white imagery, jazz clubs, and its bustling tune, New York is said to have something for everybody. However, it is still a place of solitude, of loneliness, of melancholy, which I was also drawn into. In his idiosyncratic travel book ornamented with sociological and philosophical insights, “America”, Baudrillard devotes a separate chapter to New York where he discusses the loneliness of its inhabitants: “the number of people here who think alone, sing alone, and eat and talk alone in the streets is mind-boggling.” He states that there is a certain solitude here like no other city in the world: “that of the man preparing his meal in public on a wall, or on the hood of his car, or along a fence, alone. You see that all the time here. It is the saddest sight in the world. Sadder than destitution, sadder than the beggar is the man who eats alone in public ….. He who eats alone is dead.” When I came back from New York and start reading this book several months later, I realized an obvious thing that I have not noticed before in my own pictures: the “fragile faces” which were triggering in me some sort of melancholy. I think this is related with the precarious nature of life that people were leading here. The conditions of uncertainty, precarity and contingency rising out of the immanent contradictions of this city must have been contributing to the loneliness of its inhabitants – and to the deliriousness of New York, herself. However, these pictures made me question my very self, as well. Was it the loneliness of its inhabitants indeed, or the individual and internal solitude of the photographer? After being preoccupied with this seemingly simple question for quite a while, I finally have come to the conclusion that, we somehow reveal ourselves in the pictures we take – sometimes on purpose, but most of the time unwittingly.