The Loneliness of Seeing

Lately, I’ve been thinking about what photography means to me beyond the frame and the process, about why, even after all these years, I still feel both comforted and unsettled by it. It isn’t just about making pictures; it’s about learning how to stand still in the world, to listen to it quietly, and to feel both part of it and apart from it at the same time.

There’s a certain quiet that comes with holding a camera. Not the silence of absence, but the quiet of being deeply within something. A street corner. A patch of light. A fleeting expression that appears for a moment and then is gone. Photography, for me, has always been both a comfort and a kind of mirror. It soothes, but it can also deepen that feeling of being alone.

In a city surrounded by RAF bases, I often notice groups of photographers waiting together to capture the roar of aircraft cutting through the sky. There’s an energy to it, a shared sense of purpose. Photography, in that world, feels like a gathering, a community, a celebration of precision and timing.

For me, though, the act of seeing tends to happen alone. There’s no crowd, no cheer, just the soft click of the shutter and the small breath before and after. Yet in that quiet, I find something that feels like belonging.

To photograph is to walk, to wait, to notice. It’s a rhythm that asks for patience and presence. It reminds me of the writers and explorers who travelled not to conquer but to understand. People like Kerouac, who wandered to feel the edges of life, to exist within a moment rather than chase the next one.

Photography feels like that kind of journey. You begin searching for an image, but what you are really doing is finding your place inside time. Standing there, camera in hand, you are saying to the world: I am here, and so is this.

Sometimes that feels enough. Sometimes it reminds you how small you are. Both truths sit side by side when you look through the viewfinder.

Maybe that’s what keeps me returning to it. Photography doesn’t erase loneliness; it gives it shape. It turns it into something you can hold. It says: This is what it feels like to be alive and apart. And somehow, that becomes its own kind of belonging.

Lately, I’ve started to see that maybe this is what I’ve been chasing all along. Not the perfect image or the decisive moment, but the quiet recognition that to see, really see, is its own kind of connection. Even in solitude, we are part of something larger, something that keeps moving, waiting to be noticed.