People Wanna
Be Alone

The mask slips off in public.

I sometimes find myself at my most comfortable when I am in public, with my camera in hand, trying to disappear into the environment, blending in so that I can experience the streets in their natural state.

Humberto Giannini mapped everyday life as a circuit in terms of the physical locations it takes place: home, street, work, and back again.

The plaza, the public space of everyone, sits at the center of that map as the place designed for being seen, for the performance of belonging, for the unspoken agreement that in public, we are all slightly less ourselves.

On the other end, being at home is the private space, the cave, where we are free from any masks – a return to self, to the comfort of the womb where we are safe and do not need to perform for anyone.

People Wanna Be Alone is about those who mix those two and break the contract.

Shot on film, this is a long-term project that follows that breach wherever it appears — in parks, plazas, transit, waiting rooms, the overlooked corners of cities where necessity, exhaustion, or simple unawareness leads people to reclaim their private selves in plain sight: the archaeology of an unguarded moment.

Giannini called the plaza a reflective space. These photographs attempt to be a plaza of our own to observe and reflect on those individuals that find themselves outside the most subtle of norms — when someone, for a second or an hour, simply stops performing for a world that wasn't watching anyway.