Loneliness

It is also why so many great photographs concern loneliness. The lens may distance the photographer from the rest of humanity, but with that distance comes an enhanced ability to see what is overlooked and underloved, whether it is the piebald of shadows decorating the side of a house, or the greased-glass door of a motel (the melancholy iconography of the American road—the motels, the slumping wooden houses, the elm half-choked to death by kudzu, the sun-cracked stucco building—is to modern photography what a wheel of cheese and a tumble of grapes were to Renaissance painting), or, most powerfully, the lone human being.