10 photo–books about isolation from before the Coronavirus

We cherry–picked ten photobooks that touched the topic of isolation (and solitude) back when no one would have ever imagined a quarantined world.

The latest news are encouraging, but the world at the mercy of coronavirus is still locked down, even though at different stages of loosening. And while good weather is coming out and we start to make some plans for the summer, the anxiety for what lies ahead — and that won’t surely be how we would have imagined it just two months ago — is still with us.

A lot of things have changed since the first Covid–19 case, and lot of things still will change, more or less permanently, above all our way of looking at sociability. And if the appreciation of maybe solid but surely old values ("all that really matters") is a positive side of the quarantine, as a matter of fact we are spending a lot of time alone with ourselves, if not in isolation.

Through the news from the trenches, the deserted cities, the intimate diaries and the through–the–screen portraits, photography is doing its best, but it also struggles, to keep up with the times and convey the new condition: but isolation, whether intentional or forced, has always been dear to photographers as a topic, and among the many things that is possible to experience at home right now is that of discover (or rediscover) a few books that can accompany and even teach us something during these days of social distancing.

We sorted out ten books: browse the gallery to check them out.

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