Alone Together
Between 2004 and 2014, New York-based artist Yolanda del Amo photographed couples and families who share spaces but inhabit separate worlds—a lucid chronicle of disconnection in an age of digital isolation.
By Guénola Pellen. Photos by Yolanda del Amo.
In her essay “Alone Together,” writer and photography critic Jean Dykstra captures the paradox at the heart of del Amo’s work: “We want to connect, and we want to be alone, and we’re often enigmas even to ourselves.”
In this picture, Marcela and Hugo appear to cogitate in separate chambers—one green, the other mustard yellow—each room glowing softly through windows perpendicular to the other, 90 degrees of marital geometry.
“What once must have been love has morphed into spaces where two people cannot even see each other,” observes photography historian and critic Vicki Goldberg in the book’s opening essay, “Islands in the Sea of Life.”
Yolanda del Amo orchestrates her shots like tableaux with theatrical precision, casting friends and family as unwitting performers. “She rearranged people, dictating where they sat or stood as well as their postures and positions,” Goldberg adds.
“These people became actors for a mere moment—a moment that will most likely last beyond a lifetime, in a photographic theater set arranged by a photographer who is the playwright, director, and stage manager.”
This heartbreaking image stages Sarah collapsing before cardboard boxes stacked with folded departures, on the brink of her separation. “All of Sarah’s slacks, sweaters, and emotions are packed up, only for her to find out that cardboard and tape aren’t strong enough to silence feelings,” Goldberg notes.
Yolanda del Amo does not create portraits in the conventional sense. She invents, conceives, and constructs moments of life from unwritten plays.
Her use of color detonates as emotional lexicon. Saccharine pinks yield to the mustard yellows and deep greens of marital chambers, each chromatic choice mapping the emotional temperature of relationships—soft tones for fragile connections, saturated hues for spaces where distance has ossified into walls.
“The setting becomes a psychological extension of the characters,” the artist explains. Domestic architecture externalizes psyche, transforms furnished interiors into cartographies of estrangement.
Here, a father cradles his newborn while the mother turns her back on them and gazes out the window with neither energy nor interest. “The tensions that lurk in these images are part and parcel of the human condition,” Goldberg writes. “We are social creatures but individuals too, with needs, wants, desires, and pressures.”
“Del Amo’s single images attain an uncommon combination of inner thoughts and outer circumstances, apparent reality and an uneasy whiff of unreality,” Goldberg concludes, “an intensely quiet, eloquent stillness with tremors of feeling.”
These introspective islands deserve lingering. Who knows? You might well recognize yourself there.
Yolanda del Amo’s Archipelago is published by Kehrer Verlag and available for 55€
