This L.A. photo project shows loneliness in uncomfortable ways — and helps people feel seen

The photograph is truthful intimate, truthful vulnerable, it’s achy to look at.

It depicts a pistillate successful her aboriginal 20s lying connected a infirmary furniture twisted to the side, her wrists and ankles restrained. The black-and-white representation — astir 5 feet wide — is truthful crisp that bits of the woman’s toenail polish glimmer and the hairsbreadth connected her thigh appears to spark. Most pronounced: the loneliness and resignation connected her face.

“I was 20 oregon 21 then. I’d had a psychotic occurrence and was taken to a nationalist infirmary successful Massachusetts,” says Palm Springs-based creator Lisa McCord of the self-portrait she aboriginal staged. “I’m precise transparent and I wanted to stock my acquisition afterward. It was the ‘70s. I’d archer people, successful school, I’d been successful a psychiatric infirmary and nary 1 wanted to bent retired with maine — it was a precise lonely time.”

McCord’s enactment is portion of an accumulation astatine the Los Angeles Center of Photography addressing the thought of loneliness, present considered an epidemic successful America. The exhibition, “Reservoir: Photography, Loneliness and Well Being,” was curated by LACP‘s enforcement director, Rotem Rozental, and includes information from much than 40 artists representing “a wide array of geographies, approaches, ages, nationalities and lived experiences,” she says.

Rozental had been reasoning astir loneliness successful our nine — however progressively pervasive it is — since the commencement of the pandemic. In precocious 2024 she began having conversations astir it with LACP committee seat and creator Jennifer Pritchard. Art reflects the satellite that we unrecorded successful and Rozental felt that, arsenic a photography center, LACP had an work to amplify “some of the larger issues” our nine is grappling with.

“There’s thing astir photography that truly brings radical unneurotic astir their vulnerabilities,” Rozental says. “Even if it conscionable means you’re seeing, done an image, that idiosyncratic other is experiencing what you’re experiencing.”

In this case: loneliness — “something that is looming dense connected everybody,” Rozental adds.

Asiya Al. Sharabi’s “Inward” (2025) addresses the uncertainty, and sometimes loneliness, of being a pistillate and an immigrant.

(Asiya Al. Sharabi)

Chronic loneliness is simply a serious, increasing nationalist wellness concern, says Dr. Jeremy Nobel, a prof astatine the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and writer of the 2023 publication “Project UnLonely: Healing Our Crisis of Disconnection.”

“Most caller studies bespeak that 50% of Americans are often lonely,” Nobel says, adding that a December 2025 survey recovered that “loneliness is increasing, adjacent aft the pandemic. And it’s driving a alteration successful behavior, the large 1 being that radical are disengaging from each different and assemblage activities, truthful that besides isolates them.”

What’s more, chronic loneliness has tangible, unsafe effects connected our health, helium says.

“Loneliness increases the hazard of bosom onslaught and changeable and wide aboriginal mortality by up to 30%. Dementia hazard goes up by 40%, diabetes hazard goes up 35% from being chronically lonely. That’s accrued the urgency to code it arsenic a nationalist wellness crisis.”

It’s important to note, Nobel says, that there’s a quality betwixt being alone and being lonely, with the erstwhile perchance bully for your health.

“Being unsocial means you don’t person societal connection. Loneliness is the subjective feeling that you don’t person the societal connections you want,” Nobel says. “You tin beryllium lonely successful a crowd, you tin beryllium lonely successful a racist workplace, you tin beryllium lonely successful a failed narration oregon marriage. But being alone can really beryllium rather affirmative — solitude. You tin beryllium successful interaction with thoughts and feelings and tin person affectional growth.”

Nobel consulted with galore of the artists during the improvement of “Reservoir.” It was a earthy pairing arsenic his much than 20-year-old nonprofit, the Foundation for Art & Healing, explores however originative look helps individuals and communities heal. The acquisition “definitely validated ‘how bash originative radical usage their originative predisposition to further research and uncover what’s going connected with loneliness,’” helium says. “That’s the powerfulness of this exhibit.”

A item changeable from Diane Meyer’s “The Empty Space of Nothing #43” (2025)

(Diane Meyer)

To make the exhibition, Rozental selected six photographic mentors, each established artists, each of whom chose a taxable astir loneliness — “aging,” “immigration,” “technology and hyper-consumerism” oregon “the solo originative process,” for example. The mentors past invited artists to make caller enactment responding to their themes. Over 9 months past year, the groups of artists met monthly connected Zoom — “six countries and 7 clip zones,” says Rozental — on with therapists, scholars and others to plumb the topic.

The resulting accumulation features mostly two-dimensional photography but besides includes multimedia works and 3D installations.

L.A.-based creator Diane Meyer sourced astir 100 aged black-and-white photographs from backstage collections. Then she hand-painted each of them, blocking retired astir everything successful the representation but prime figures with achromatic paint. The individuals successful the photos look to interval successful a oversea of clouds oregon snow, disconnected.

In 1 image, 2 young boys teeter connected a seesaw, arsenic if suspended successful midair; successful another, a middle-aged antheral lies connected a broad successful the fetal position, achromatic overgarment spilling implicit onto his broad and body, arsenic if helium is sinking into a void. The originative process — which the enactment speaks to — is evident here, the artist’s manus noticeable. The overgarment is splotchy successful places and the photographs are pinned delicately to a acheronian surface, their edges curling, giving the wide installation a textured materiality.

Meyer’s enactment is successful stark opposition to Jacque Rupp’s installation connected the other wall. Rupp’s slick multimedia enactment speaks to some exertion and societal perceptions of aging women. After precocious becoming a grandmother, the Bay Area-based creator asked AI to “imagine a grandma successful 2025.” The effect is simply a black-and-white photograph grid of respective 100 pistillate faces staring blankly into the camera, mouths closed and eyes vacant. Beside it is simply a TV show connected which their faces morph into 1 another, without audio. The wide effect is polished and high-tech, touching connected the perceived invisibility of women arsenic they age.

“I felt that these 2 works needed to beryllium successful conversation,” Rozental says.

Julia Buteux’s “Have We Said Hello” (2025)

(Rotem Rozental)

Nearby, Julia Buteux’s three-dimensional installation of transparent cloth panels bent from the ceiling, shimmying successful the aerial and inviting guests to locomotion astir it. The Rhode Island-based creator downloaded images from societal media and deleted the radical from them. The backgrounds are colorful but each that’s near of the taxable is simply a transparent imprint of their look and precocious body. “So you’re getting the lack of the user,” Rozental says. It speaks to however isolating online societal milieus tin be.

Asiya Al. Sharabi — who is Yemeni American and lives betwixt Egypt and Virginia — created large-scale, conceptual self-portraits that she manipulated successful the printing process. One is simply a treble vulnerability depicting the beforehand and broadside of her face. It addresses issues of duality and the uncertainty of her lasting successful nine arsenic some a pistillate and an immigrant. In another, the creator sits successful a rocking seat successful a location beside a vase of dormant flowers — but her assemblage is transparent. “She astir disappears wrong the home space,” Rozental says.

McCord’s photograph is portion of a larger interactive installation that includes a “visual diary” guests tin flip done featuring photographs of her beingness implicit the decades paired with handwritten diary entries from 1977 to 2021. McCord narrates snippets from the diary, which visitors whitethorn perceive to connected headphones.

“Reservoir” aims, of course, to radiance a airy connected the information of loneliness. But it besides hopes to service arsenic a nationalist wellness involution by hosting originative workshops — incorporating the photography successful the accumulation — to code loneliness and spark connection.

“Creative look changes our brains,” Nobel says. “It reduces levels of the accent hormone cortisol, it increases the levels of the feel-good hormones, truthful you’re little anxious astir the satellite and successful a amended mood. It’s past easier to prosecute with others. It invites america to beryllium little lonely and much connected, not conscionable to different people, but ourselves.”

The exhibition, which closes March 14, is planned to question internationally, including to the Museo Arte Al Límite successful Chile, the Inside Out Centre for the Arts successful South Africa and to the Karuizawa Foto Fest successful Japan. The extremity is to usage the store constituent arsenic a exemplary that tin beryllium replicated successful assemblage arts organizations astir the world.

Rozental says photography is the cleanable conduit for that, calling the mean “a language, a abstraction for transportation and communication.”

“We anticipation that radical volition locomotion into this abstraction and spot themselves connected the walls,” she says. “Maybe their load volition easiness a small spot by knowing that they mightiness consciousness lonely, but they’re not alone.”