I have a big group of friends. I am not the person sitting alone at lunch or waiting by the phone. I show up. I laugh. I am, by most definitions, fine. And yet somewhere in the middle of a perfectly normal Tuesday, surrounded by people I genuinely like, I have felt completely hollow. Not sad, exactly. More like watching myself from slightly outside my own body like present, participating, and somehow still not there.
That feeling is what this project is about. Not loneliness in the obvious sense. Something quieter and harder to explain. the gap between being with people and actually feeling connected to anything. The disconnect that shows up even when everything looks okay from the outside. I started noticing it in small moments. Someone in my batch gets an internship, or finishes something, or just seems to be moving and I'm standing in the same place I was last semester, same canteen, same table, same tray. It's not jealousy, not really. It's more like a dull awareness that time is passing and I don't have much to show for the passing. Everyone around me seems to be accumulating something. I feel like I'm just waiting for a version of myself that hasn't shown up yet. "The blur in these photos isn't a technique. It's the feeling — everyone moving at a frequency I can hear but can't quite tune into."
That's why I picked up the camera. I wanted to make the internal thing visible. The long exposure shots weren't planned as a concept but they came from trying to capture exactly this. what it looks like when you are the still thing and everything else is in motion. When your friends are talking and you're at the same table with your headphones in, not because you don't want to be there, but because some days the distance just appears and you don't know how to close it.
The spaces mattered to me too. Staircases, canteens, lecture halls, the library. these are the places college says you're supposed to be becoming something. And I kept finding myself in them, physically present, mentally somewhere else entirely. Sitting on steps while people climbed past. Slumped over a desk with other people's open books on either side. I didn't stage those feelings. I just photographed the architecture that already held them.
I don't think I'm broken. I don't think I'm behind. But college has this way of making you feel like everyone received a memo you didn't get, about how to feel purposeful, how to always be moving toward something. This project is me saying: some of us are still figuring out which direction is forward. And that's not nothing. It's just not the version of this experience anyone puts in the college brochure.
The people around her are blurred because they’re moving easy, unbothered, free. She isn’t. She’s the one sitting with the weight of it, hand pressed to her head, staring forward while everyone else seems to float through the same space without effort. I wanted to capture that specific feeling: being surrounded and still completely alone in it, the only one for whom college feels like something to survive.
Everyone else dissolves into motion. He stays sharp — arms crossed, eyes
shut, the only fixed point in a room built for momentum. I shot this to ask
what it feels like to be still while the world keeps going, and to show that
stillness isn’t absence. Sometimes it’s the loudest thing in the frame.
He’s on the table, not at it. Already slightly outside the grammar of the room.
Cross-legged, hands folded, looking straight into the camera with something
between resignation and calm. On either side, people blur past. I wanted this
to feel less like loneliness and more like a quiet decision to stop performing movement you don’t actually feel.
This is the same person, same room. but now fully horizontal, arms open, surrendered. The figures around him are more frantic here, almost violent in their blur. He’s not sleeping. He’s given up on vertical. I shot this to capture
that specific kind of college exhaustion where you don’t even have the energy
to look like you’re trying anymore, and the world just keeps moving around
your body.
The two chairs on either side are empty but their books are open, mid-page, like whoever was there just got up and left. He’s in the
centre, and he has nothing in front of him. No book, no notes,
nothing. Just himself, face down. The whole frame becomes about
absence and presence at the same time other people were here,
doing the thing, moving through it. He stayed. He’s the only one still in his seat, and somehow that makes him look the most lost. I wanted the overhead angle to make that geometry unavoidable,
surrounded by evidence of everyone else’s effort, with none of his own.
The library is the most loaded space on any campus all that
knowledge, all that expectation, shelf after shelf of it. And here he is,
reclined, a book tented over his face like a small roof. Glasses on his
chest, not his eyes. He’s opted out, quietly and completely, right in
the middle of the place designed to hold him accountable. There’s
something almost funny about it, and then something very sad. I let
both exist.
A staircase is the most literal metaphor college has I think. You’re
supposed to be climbing, always climbing. Everyone around him is. Two figures blur past, one on each side, moving upward without
ait, head in his hand, completely still.
Not resting between floors. Just stopped. The stairs keep going above him and he isn’t on them. I wanted this to be the image that names the feeling most directly that everyone else seems to know which way is up, and some days you just sit on the steps and watch them go.
She’s not alone, that’s what makes this harder to name. Her people
are right there, talking, laughing, doing what a group does on a night out. She’s seated behind them, still, watching the back of a conversation she isn’t inside. No one has walked away. No one
excluded her. She just isn’t in it, and nobody noticed. I shot this from
behind her because that’s where the feeling lives, not in her face, but in the gap between her stillness and their motion. Present in every way that can be counted. Absent in the only way that matters.
His friends aren’t ignoring him. That’s the whole point. They’re eating, talking, being normal and he’s right there with his tray, his cup, his headphones, looking sideways at something nobody else is
looking at. The disconnect isn’t anyone’s fault. It’s just there, quiet
and stubborn, like a frequency nobody else is on. I wanted the
canteen chaos in the background, all those bodies, all that noise he can’t quite let in. The headphones aren’t antisocial. They’re a soft wall. A way of being present enough to stay, without being open
enough to arrive.
DoubleSpeak 