LACP exhibit ‘Reservoir’ explores the visible language of loneliness

The {photograph} is so intimate, so weak, it’s painful to have a look at.

It depicts a lady in her early 20s mendacity on a hospital mattress twisted to the facet, her wrists and ankles restrained. The black-and-white picture — practically 5 ft large — is so crisp that bits of the girl’s toenail polish glimmer and the hair on her thigh seems to spark. Most pronounced: the loneliness and resignation on her face.

“I was 20 or 21 then. I’d had a psychotic episode and was taken to a public hospital in Massachusetts,” says Palm Springs-based artist Lisa McCord of the self-portrait she later staged. “I’m very transparent and I wanted to share my experience afterward. It was the ‘70s. I’d tell people, in school, I’d been in a psychiatric hospital and no one wanted to hang out with me — it was a very lonely time.”

McCord’s work is a part of an exhibition on the Los Angeles Center of Photography addressing the concept of loneliness, now thought of an epidemic in America. The exhibition, “Reservoir: Photography, Loneliness and Well Being,” was curated by LACP‘s executive director, Rotem Rozental, and includes participation from more than 40 artists representing “a wide array of geographies, approaches, ages, nationalities and lived experiences,” she says.

Rozental had been thinking about loneliness in our society — how increasingly pervasive it is — since the start of the pandemic. In late 2024 she began having conversations about it with LACP board chair and artist Jennifer Pritchard. Art reflects the world that we live in and Rozental felt that, as a photography center, LACP had an obligation to amplify “some of the larger issues” our society is grappling with.

“There’s one thing about pictures that basically brings folks collectively round their vulnerabilities,” Rozental says. “Even if it just means you’re seeing, through an image, that someone else is experiencing what you’re experiencing.”

In this case: loneliness — “something that is looming heavy on everybody,” Rozental provides.

Asiya Al. Sharabi’s “Inward” (2025) addresses the uncertainty, and typically loneliness, of being a lady and an immigrant.

(Asiya Al. Sharabi)

Chronic loneliness is a critical, rising public health concern, says Dr. Jeremy Nobel, a professor on the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and creator of the 2023 guide “Project UnLonely: Healing Our Crisis of Disconnection.”

“Most recent studies indicate that 50% of Americans are often lonely,” Nobel says, including {that a} December 2025 study discovered that “loneliness is increasing, even after the pandemic. And it’s driving a change in behavior, the big one being that people are disengaging from each other and community activities, so that also isolates them.”

What’s extra, persistent loneliness has tangible, harmful results on our well being, he says.

“Loneliness increases the risk of heart attack and stroke and general early mortality by up to 30%. Dementia risk goes up by 40%, diabetes risk goes up 35% from being chronically lonely. That’s increased the urgency to address it as a public health crisis.”

It’s necessary to notice, Nobel says, that there’s a distinction between being alone and being lonely, with the previous doubtlessly good on your well being.

“Being alone means you don’t have social connection. Loneliness is the subjective feeling that you don’t have the social connections you want,” Nobel says. “You can be lonely in a crowd, you can be lonely in a racist workplace, you can be lonely in a failed relationship or marriage. But being alone can actually be quite positive — solitude. You can be in touch with thoughts and feelings and can have emotional growth.”

Nobel consulted with lots of the artists through the improvement of “Reservoir.” It was a pure pairing as his greater than 20-year-old nonprofit, the Foundation for Art & Healing, explores how artistic expression helps people and communities heal. The expertise “definitely validated ‘how do creative people use their creative orientation to further explore and reveal what’s going on with loneliness,’” he says. “That’s the power of this exhibit.”

A element shot from Diane Meyer’s “The Empty Space of Nothing #43” (2025)

(Diane Meyer)

To create the exhibition, Rozental chosen six photographic mentors, all established artists, every of whom selected a theme round loneliness — “aging,” “immigration,” “technology and hyper-consumerism” or “the solo creative process,” for instance. The mentors then invited artists to create new work responding to their themes. Over 9 months final yr, the teams of artists met month-to-month on Zoom — “six countries and seven time zones,” says Rozental — together with therapists, students and others to plumb the subject.

The ensuing exhibition options principally two-dimensional pictures but additionally consists of multimedia works and 3D installations.

L.A.-based artist Diane Meyer sourced about 100 previous black-and-white pictures from personal collections. Then she hand-painted every of them, blocking out most every little thing within the picture besides choose figures with white paint. The people within the pictures seem to drift in a sea of clouds or snow, disconnected.

In one picture, two younger boys teeter on a seesaw, as if suspended in midair; in one other, a middle-aged man lies on a blanket within the fetal place, white paint spilling over onto his blanket and physique, as if he’s sinking right into a void. The artistic course of — which the work speaks to — is obvious right here, the artist’s hand noticeable. The paint is splotchy in locations and the pictures are pinned delicately to a darkish floor, their edges curling, giving the general set up a textured materiality.

Meyer’s work is in stark distinction to Jacque Rupp’s set up on the alternative wall. Rupp’s slick multimedia work speaks to each know-how and societal perceptions of growing older girls. After not too long ago turning into a grandmother, the Bay Area-based artist requested AI to “imagine a grandmother in 2025.” The result’s a black-and-white photograph grid of a number of hundred feminine faces staring blankly into the digicam, mouths closed and eyes vacant. Beside it’s a TV monitor on which their faces morph into each other, with out audio. The general impact is polished and high-tech, concerning the perceived invisibility of ladies as they age.

“I felt that these two works needed to be in conversation,” Rozental says.

Julia Buteux’s “Have We Said Hello” (2025)

(Rotem Rozental)

Nearby, Julia Buteux’s three-dimensional set up of clear material panels grasp from the ceiling, shimmying within the air and welcoming visitors to stroll round it. The Rhode Island-based artist downloaded pictures from social media and deleted the folks from them. The backgrounds are colourful however all that’s left of the topic is a clear imprint of their face and higher physique. “So you’re getting the absence of the user,” Rozental says. It speaks to how isolating on-line social milieus will be.

Asiya Al. Sharabi — who’s Yemeni American and lives between Egypt and Virginia — created large-scale, conceptual self-portraits that she manipulated within the printing course of. One is a double publicity depicting the entrance and facet of her face. It addresses problems with duality and the uncertainty of her standing in society as each a lady and an immigrant. In one other, the artist sits in a rocking chair in a house beside a vase of useless flowers — however her physique is clear. “She almost disappears within the domestic space,” Rozental says.

McCord’s {photograph} is a component of a bigger interactive set up that features a “visual diary” visitors can flip by way of that includes pictures of her life over the many years paired with handwritten diary entries from 1977 to 2021. McCord narrates snippets from the diary, which guests could hearken to on headphones.

“Reservoir” goals, after all, to shine a light-weight on the situation of loneliness. But it additionally hopes to function a public well being intervention by internet hosting artistic workshops — incorporating the pictures within the exhibition — to deal with loneliness and spark connection.

“Creative expression changes our brains,” Nobel says. “It reduces levels of the stress hormone cortisol, it increases the levels of the feel-good hormones, so you’re less anxious about the world and in a better mood. It’s then easier to engage with others. It invites us to be less lonely and more connected, not just to other people, but ourselves.”

The exhibition, which closes March 14, is deliberate to journey internationally, together with to the Museo Arte Al Límite in Chile, the Inside Out Centre for the Arts in South Africa and to the Karuizawa Foto Fest in Japan. The aim is to make use of the workshop aspect as a mannequin that may be replicated in group arts organizations around the globe.

Rozental says pictures is the right conduit for that, calling the medium “a language, a space for connection and communication.”

“We hope that people will walk into this space and see themselves on the walls,” she says. “Maybe their burden will ease a little bit by knowing that they might feel lonely, but they’re not alone.”