New York City

This is what it looks like to be one among many

A woman in a polka-dot hat. A man's profile. Another hat, woven. Dark glasses. Sharp light cutting across faces. Shadows slicing the frame into pieces. Everyone moving in their own direction, no one looking at each other, all of them pressed into the same tight rectangle of a city sidewalk.

Lee Friedlander made this photograph in 1971, but it could be today. It could be any city. Because this is what cities do — they put you shoulder to shoulder with people you will never know. Hundreds of them. Thousands. All of you alone together.

Look at how he compressed them. The depth is flattened — everyone exists on the same visual plane, like a collage. That woman in the hat could be touching the man behind her or ten feet away; you can't tell. Friedlander turned three-dimensional space into a puzzle of overlapping shapes. People become patterns.

This is the opposite of Munch's lonely figures on the shore. Those two people had all that space and still couldn't bridge the distance between them. These people have no space at all. They're crammed together. And yet — look at their faces. No one is connecting. Everyone is isolated in the crowd.

Friedlander spent decades photographing American streets, always finding ways to make the familiar look strange. He loved reflections, shadows, fragments, accidents. He showed us that even when we're surrounded by people, we're still fundamentally separate. The crowd doesn't cure loneliness. Sometimes it makes it worse.

But here's the thing: you're in there. Somewhere. Maybe not in this exact photograph, but in the crowd it represents. Walking down the street with your headphones in. Riding the subway. Standing in line. Passing through.

And so is everyone else. All of us, moving through our separate lives in the same compressed space, occasionally visible to each other for a fraction of a second before we disappear back into our own orbits.