Dining Alone: In the Company of Solitude - Hardcover

by Nancy Scherl (Author), Laura Pressley (Foreword by)

DIning Alone: In the Company of Solitude is a fine art photography book that highlights the experience of being alone in public. Scherl uses peopled restaurant interiors as a metaphor to explore the complexities of the subject of solitude. The subtle nuances of her lone diners visually define their experience. This long-term project spanning three decades, culminated during the Covid-19 pandemic.
--Nancy Scherl

Author Biography

Nancy Scherl is a fine art photographer based in New York City. She describes her work as cinematic. Stylistically, Nancy emulates cinema verité, often posing her subjects, offering subtle direction, and asking them to "act out" how they feel while they are posed in a specific setting. The setting is frequently enhanced with cinematic lighting to create a specific ambience. Nancy's more candid portraits also emulate cinema verité, but here she both blurs the boundaries between pictorial and street genres and draws from Cartier-Bresson's "decisive moment." Her camerawork may include a predetermined background and sometimes controlled lighting, but she will capture her subjects more spontaneously, once they appear within her camera frame.

Nancy also creates fictional narratives, which she refers to as Staged Fantasies. As a provocateur, she lures viewers into her scientifically impossible visual worlds, designed to intrigue viewers into considering anew their formerly trusted points of view and aspects of the human condition.

Laura Pressley is an experienced Cultural Producer powering multi-faceted events serving local, national, and international communities. As a Certified Executive Director of CENTER in Santa Fe, she directs one of the most effective outcome-driven programs in the world for photography and lens-based media, CENTER's annual Review Santa Fe Photo Symposium.

In addition to her role at CENTER, Laura is currently a Fellow in the Policy Evaluation Lab, at the University of New Mexico.