Like there was only them in the world

By Albin Hillert, Life on Earth Pictures

Photography is an interesting craft. And for the most part, it is as much about people as it is about skill.

Putting it simply, that meeting with people, of connecting and learning and sharing experiences, is often what makes photography worthwhile.

But then there are also those moments, when the whole sense of interconnectedness is flipped on its side.

Those moments when you capture an image, you pause to look at it, and there’s an unmistakeable feeling of singularity to it — as if the person in front of your camera, something about their focus and their poise, tells you they could just as well have been the only person left in existence on the planet. As if there was simply nothing and no one else.

There’s a few of the times it’s happened to me.

Tupá Mirim Joyan, a Guaraní man from Sao Paulo, Brazil, sings a traditional indigenous chant.

A woman folds her hands in prayer in a church in southern Stockholm, Sweden.

Waded a few metres out into the 80 kilometre expanse of water between the island of Gotland and the Swedish mainland, Erik Sjödin casts a fly at sunset in the hopes of hooking a sea-run trout.