1. Escape, Danila Tkachenko (Peperoni Books, 2014) According to Tarkovsky man doesn’t need society, but it’s indeed the other way around. Raised in a big city but always drawn to wildlife, Russian photographer Danila Tkachenko has crossed his country looking for those who decided to walk away from the physical and conceptual borders that man impose to himself, most of the time without even realizing it, when living with his fellow humans. In a pre–original sin context, the quest on the tracks of the so–called “Escapers” brings him to investigate the very concept of freedom, and its flipside: alienation.

1. Escape, Danila Tkachenko (Peperoni Books, 2014)

2. Broken Manual, Alec Soth (Steidl, 2011) An ocean away, between 2006 and 2010 the American Alec Soth does even more: not only he crosses the United States to meet people which have refused to live in the human society as we usually know it, but he then drafts a true vademecum for those who, inspired by their experiences and results, would like to follow suit. Hidden (as proper to their state of samizdat) in a nod carved through the pages of unsuspected textbooks, the 300 manuals have soon become nowhere to be found, and Soth, who in a pretty personal version of Lost in Translation has then experienced the taste of isolation locking himself in a room of the Park Hyatt Tokyo for five days and bringing the city to him, has since then become one of the most sought after photographers of his generation.

2. Broken Manual, Alec Soth (Steidl, 2011)

3. The Disappearance of Joseph Plummer, Amani Willett (Overlapse, 2017) Rather suspended between meta and autofiction, New Yorker Amani Willett’s book takes shape when his father buys a shed and some land in a remote spot in New Hampshire. Here the photographer chances upon the elusive Joseph Plummer, a hermit who used to roam in the same area at the end of 18^th century and whose traces, although messy, are still present in that physical and psychic landscape. Retracing his own paths, and trying to reenact his memories, Willett draws a poetic portrait, desolate and yet fascinating, of a man who has maybe never existed, but that photography makes almost tangible.

3. The Disappearance of Joseph Plummer, Amani Willett (Overlapse, 2017)

4. Toni Greaves, Radical Love (Chronicle Books, 2015) But the quest for personal freedom is not the sole purpose of isolation, and sometimes it’s rather the other way around: the cloister nuns portrayed by Toni Greaves in their everyday lives show a different path, where love for God can bring to radical choices. Although she left the college and a boyfriend back in what she now simply calls “the world”, and entered the convent at 21, nothing in Sister Lauren’s today life would let you think about surrender or sacrifice, neither her smile nor the vitality and intensity of her non–verbal language, so much that one could wonder if her secluded and somehow secret existence made of prayer and work, just like the inner one, isn’t a form of freedom after all.

4. Toni Greaves, Radical Love (Chronicle Books, 2015)

5. Good Gooddamn, Bryan Schutmaat (Trespasser, 2018) When it comes to freedom and solitude, not everyone could afford the luxury of choice; but, on the other hand, is also true that all of us have to live with the consequences of our own choices. And if we have taken bad decisions and are now forced to pay the price, how would we spend our last days of freedom? In his little and intimate book set in rural Texas, Bryan Schutmaat follows a soon–to–be–convicted friend among hunting trips, long beer–drinking sessions and drifting in the mud with his truck, telling a delicate and straightforward tale that only a sincere affection and a frank eye would be able to build up.

5. Good Gooddamn, Bryan Schutmaat (Trespasser, 2018)

6. In Search of Frankenstein, Chloe Dewe Mathews (Kodoji Press, 2018) The story is familiar: in 1816, stuck by the dreadful weather in a villa by Lake Geneve during what was called the “Year Without a Summer” due to various volcanic eruptions, John Polidori, Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley and his wife Mary engaged in a challenge to write a horror tale. The creature that was born from the pen of the only woman involved, is arguably the character that in the history of literature best embodies the idea of social outcast. In her artist book, British photographer Chloe Dewe Mathews creates a dialogue between the writer’s manuscript and the images shot just where, suspended between life and death, Frankenstein’s monster saw the light: a cold and, in its immaculate perfection, repellent world, so much that we can almost sense on our own skin the feeling of being constantly despised, rejected, driven out.

6. In Search of Frankenstein, Chloe Dewe Mathews (Kodoji Press, 2018)

7. Ice Fishers, Aleksey Kondratyev (Loose Joints, 2018) And way colder and harsher is the setting of the brief but intense, and somehow quite funny, book by the Russian Aleksey Kondratyev, which has portrayed the Ishim river fishers while they work in the cruel Kazakh winter. Although they strive on the same river that flows through the country’s rich and trendsetting capital Astana, these odd characters couldn’t seem farther from modern times: isolated under plastic sheets discharged by a market that would anyway leave them out, they bring the idea of solitude inherent in fishing practice to its extreme consequences, but at the same time they become an icon of a marginalization that has more to do with the economy than with a philosophy of life.

7. Ice Fishers, Aleksey Kondratyev (Loose Joints, 2018)

8. Isole d'Inverno, Federica Di Giovanni (Crowdbooks, 2018) Let’s stick with winter: what do the Italian minor islands do when the tourist season is over? By definition the geographical etymon that best refers to isolation, island is to Federica Di Giovanni a state of mind in the first place, a combination of loneliness and desire that many islanders would like to overcome but towards which they are often driven to move back to. And for Di Giovanni, who’s herself an “islander from Ponza”, during the winter the small islands scattered in the Mediterranean Sea represent a way to reflect on their true nature — as in a landscape seen by nobody but just itself — and on that of their inhabitants.

8. Isole d'Inverno, Federica Di Giovanni (Crowdbooks, 2018)

9. I'm here project, Atsushi Watanabe (2019) No man is an island, wrote in 1955 the trappist Thomas Merton (who knew much about isolation) quoting the poet John Donne. And yet some men and women, more or less suddenly at a certain point in their lives, feel they no more have any role in society, and decide to shut themselves up at home. It’s not properly a disease, nor a codified behavior disorder, but rather a social phenomenon that in Japan takes the name of hikikomori. After living as a hikikomori himself for three years, artist Atshushi Watanabe has found his place in the world again and, among his many activities, has created I’m here project, to give voice exactly to those who live this dramatic experience. And since each hihikomori isolates himself for different reasons, but invariably scales down his world to the borders of the walls he locks up himself behind, Watanabe asked a few of them to take a picture of their own room and send him via mail the results: a therapeutic act by which trying just for once to look at their own life “from the outside”, through the break that would allow us in.

9. I'm here project, Atsushi Watanabe (2019)

10. Ravens, Masahisa Fukase (MACK Books, 2017) Feeling alone in a crowd is something that most of us have experienced, at least once in our lives. But if there’s one photographer that more than any others has conveyed with cruel vividness (above all against himself) this condition, then it’s Masahisa Fukase for sure. In 1976, after divorcing his wife Yoko — to whom he had previously dedicated a book that already had the obsessiveness nature he would then be famous for — the photographer takes shelter inside himself and become a shadow. Or rather a raven. It’s with this ominous and obscure bird, urban yet wild, that in fact Fukase identifies himself to the point of fanatism: omnivorous scavengers, undesirable hosts of the cities, animals on the verge between survival instinct and reliance on man, ravens become his new obsession, basically the only subject of his work for the following ten years. Published in 1986 to wider acclaim, Karasu (Ravens) has been repeatedly mentioned as one of the most influential photography books in the history of this art and, after the accident that forced his author to be bedridden until his death in 2012, has reached the status of a cult.

10. Ravens, Masahisa Fukase (MACK Books, 2017)

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10 photo–books about isolation from before the Coronavirus

We cherry–picked ten photobooks that touched the topic of isolation (and solitude) back when no one would have ever imagined a quarantined world.

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