The Stranger (2019)

The Stranger takes its title from Albert Camus' 1942 novel L'Étranger, but becomes something else entirely through the camera's lens. This photographic series explores what it feels like to be emotionally cut off from the world around you, following the kind of disconnection that Camus wrote about through his character Meursault—someone who simply couldn't feel what he was supposed to feel.

At the heart of Camus' narrative lies Meursault, a character whose emotional flatness and apparent indifference to life's most significant moments—his mother's death, his own romantic relationship, and ultimately his commission of murder—reveals something unsettling about the nature of human experience. Meursault's journey becomes a discovery of his own uncanny self, a recognition that beneath the surface of social convention and expected emotional response lies a vast emptiness that may be more authentic than the performances of feeling that society demands.

This photographic exploration follows a similar trajectory, documenting moments of profound disconnection where the ordinary world becomes strange and unfamiliar. Each image serves as what might be called a "sealed off slice of time and space," capturing instances where the familiar mechanisms of emotional engagement seem to have broken down entirely. The photographs investigate what happens when the world continues to exist in all its mundane detail while the observer remains fundamentally unmoved by its presence.

The series examines emotional detachment not as pathology but as a particular way of seeing that reveals hidden truths about existence itself. Like Meursault's unsettling honesty about his lack of grief at his mother's funeral or his inability to manufacture love where none exists, these images refuse the comfortable lies that typically mediate our relationship with reality. They document the experience of being lost not in the sense of not knowing where one is, but in the more profound sense of not caring about anything enough to feel truly present in one's own life.

Through the camera's lens, ordinary scenes and subjects become charged with a peculiar emptiness, revealing the gap between appearance and feeling, between social expectation and internal reality. The photographs capture what Camus called the "absurd"—that fundamental mismatch between human need for meaning and the universe's apparent indifference to providing it. In this visual exploration, the absurd becomes not a philosophical concept but a lived experience visible in the spaces between people, in the quality of light on empty surfaces, in the expression of faces that seem to be looking at nothing in particular.

The project operates simultaneously as homage to Camus' literary achievement and as independent investigation into contemporary experiences of alienation and disconnection. While rooted in the existential philosophy of the mid-20th century, the series addresses concerns that remain urgently relevant: the difficulty of authentic feeling in an increasingly mediated world, the challenge of finding genuine connection in social structures that often reward performance over honesty, and the peculiar loneliness that can exist even in the midst of apparent community.

Each photograph functions as both testament to Camus' insights and standalone exploration of subjects that extend far beyond the original novel's scope. The images investigate how emotional detachment might manifest in contemporary life, examining the ways modern existence can produce its own forms of existential estrangement. They ask whether the stranger's condition is an individual pathology or a more general response to the conditions of modern life itself.

The series suggests that there might be something valuable in the stranger's refusal to participate in emotional charades, even as it acknowledges the profound isolation this refusal creates. Through visual narrative, the work explores the possibility that emotional detachment, while potentially destructive, might also offer a form of clarity unavailable to those more successfully integrated into social and emotional norms.

The Stranger ultimately presents emotional detachment as both symptom and strategy, examining how the refusal to feel what one is supposed to feel can become a form of resistance to false consolations while simultaneously cutting one off from the possibilities of genuine connection. The photographs document this paradox without offering easy resolution, creating a visual space for contemplating the complex relationship between authenticity, isolation, and the ongoing human struggle to find meaning in an apparently meaningless universe.