©Cathy Cone

Reservoir Artist Statement:
Loneliness can often feel like a private burden, but through this selection of photographic work, I explore its intimate paradox: that vulnerability, when shared, can become a source of connection. The resulting images are not simply a record of my artistic practice, living centrally isolated in Vermont, but an act of offering these deeply personal experiences to a wider community. The transformative power of this project became apparent through the dialogue with a diverse group of women mentored in a digital space, serving as its “counterforce.” The exchanges somehow disarmed the loneliness by reframing private feelings into a collective conversation. This process transformed the passive experience of loneliness into an active search for connection and understanding.

©Cathy Cone

Cathy Cone is a photographer, painter and printmaker. Cathy received her training at Ohio University, Vermont Studio Center. She received her MFA at the Maine Media College where she served as a mentor and guest faculty. Some of her exhibitions include Sewanee: University of the South, Weisman Art Museum, University of Alabama, DeCordova Museum, Griffin Museum of Photography, Brattleboro Museum and Art Center and the Vermont Center for Photography. Her works are in the collection of IBM, Hallmark Fine Art Collections, American Express, Beekman a Thompson Hotel, New York and many private collections. Cathy with her husband, master printer Jon Cone, founded Cone Editions Press in 1980 in Port Chester, NY as a collaborative printmaking workshop. Cone Editions Press is now located in East Topsham, Vermont.
Instagram:  @cathy_ cone

On February 2025, the Los Angeles Center of Photography initiated a new and innovative photographic generator: Reservoir: Loneliness, Well-Being and Photography, designed to create a shared repository of responses to the global loneliness crisis through visual storytelling. It was concepted and developed by Jennifer Pritchard, and Dr. Rotem Rozental (Executive Director of LACP and Chief Curator @rotroz). The result in an extensive, immersive exhibition and catalog. Opening on January 29th at the the Los Angeles Center of Photography, from 6 – 8pm, the exhibition will feature a collection of photographic and video responses to Loneliness created by over 40 artists over the last nine months. Prior to the opening there will be a ticketed lecture with Dr. Jeremy Nobel,|M.D.,N.P.H. on “Loneliness as a Growing Crisis: How the Arts Can Help” from 3:30 – 5pm.

As an educator, it was a compelling experience to guide a group of photographers in making work about a subject that was not necessarily at the forefront of their artistic practice. My cohort was composed of ten remarkable artists from across the United States and Brazil, whose work I am sharing today: Lynne Breitfeller (NJ), ), Julia Buteux (RI), Cathy Cone (VT), Nancy Farese (CA), Bootsy Holler (CA), Rohina Hoffman (CA), Sandra Klein (CA), Ana Leal (Brazil),  Lisa McCord (CA), and  Donna Tramatozzi (MA).

Each artist created deeply personal and distinctive work rooted in their own experiences of loneliness: the loneliness of feeling othered, of caregiving, of mental illness, and of mortality. Some of the projects also point toward possible antidotes: the discovery of third spaces, moments of connection, and time spent in nature.

Over the course of the program, the group attended lectures on loneliness, met regularly as a cohort, and worked with me individually, allowing ideas to evolve through both collective dialogue and private reflection.

As Cathy Cone stated about the Reservoir experience: The exchanges somehow disarmed the loneliness by reframing private feelings into a collective conversation. This process transformed the passive experience of loneliness into an active search for connection and understanding, the experience was cathartic.

LISA McCORD

©Lisa McCord, Self-Portrait, Restraints, 1982

Reservoir Artist Statement:
This work documents both my challenge with mental health, and the healing that led to my most authentic self, and home within.

Lisa McCord is a fine art documentary photographer from the Arkansas Delta. Her creative practice explores concepts of storytelling, memory, and the passage of time.
Instagram: @lisamccord

NANCY FARESE

©Nancy Farese, Video Still

Reservoir Artist Statement:
This audio visual piece work explores “3rd Places”—the cafés, parks, libraries, and everyday gathering spots that exist beyond home and work, where connection happens naturally. These places act as social glue, but many are disappearing as screens, privatization, and post-COVID life push us toward online spaces instead. For many people, the internet has quietly become their third place. The Archive of 3rd Places is both a record and an invitation: these spaces still exist, all around us, waiting for you.

Nancy Farese is a documentary photographer and social entrepreneur exploring how visual storytelling drives cultural and social change. My work ranges from global humanitarian issues, as covered in a 2021 book Potential Space; a Serious Look at Children’s Play, to deeply personal projects, as presented in a 2024 book, I Still Speak Southern in My Head, examining identity and memory in the American South. Through founding PhotoPhilanthropy and CatchLight, I’ve built platforms that use visual media as a tool for impact. She especially interested in how images influence public dialogue and connect us across differences.
Instagram @nancyfarese

DONNA TRAMONTOZZI

©Donna Tramontozzi, Reeds

©Donna Tramontozzi, Starfish

Reservoir Artist Statement:

In moments of loneliness, we often turn to nature for solace. Nature offers us a reminder that we are part of a whole—that we are not alone, but connected to nature’s plenitude. Lean into natural places and they will connect you with beauty, with life, and with belonging.

Visual artist Donna Tramontozzi’s practice explores the profound relationship between nature and human beings. Probing into the living world by manipulating its patterns, colors and shapes, she uncovers its many facets and dimensions and points to the solace and healing that lies at the heart of that relationship.

BOOTSY HOLLER

©Bootsy Holler

Reservoir Artist Statement:

Death, dying, and grief are complex, isolating experiences that can be difficult to navigate,

often leaving one confronting profound loneliness.

Grief feels heavy, confusing, and overwhelming;

its presence is a silent companion that is hard to articulate.

It arrives in unpredictable waves, leaving you stranded in a sea of feelings.

Yet, when I sit with my grief and express it through art, my confusion finds both release and meaning in a tangible form.

Bootsy Holler is a Los Angeles-based artist known for her multifaceted skills, which encompass photography, sculpture, and bookmaking, with a focus on family, secrets, and hidden emotions.

Instagram: @@bootsyholler   

ROHINA HOFFMAN                           

©Rohina Hoffman, from Cartography of Loneliness

©Rohina Hoffman, from A Carography of Lonliness

Reservoir Artist Statement:

A Cartography of Loneliness

This project compiles 384 colors extracted from artworks by artists across twelve global regions, building a chromatic archive of how loneliness and longing are rendered in visual culture. Presented as a diptych of grid and spectrum, the work moves from classification to continuity, tracing solitude as both deeply personal and quietly shared.

Rohina Hoffman is an Indian-born American artist whose work explores identity, belonging, and the emotional landscapes of home and the female experience. After a career in clinical neurology, she now devotes herself fully to photography, bringing a blend of scientific rigor and poetic sensitivity to her practice. She is based in California.

Instagram: @rohinaphoto

LYNNE BREITFELLER

©Lynne Breitfeller, Dad in the Bedroom, from Today is Yesterday and Tomorrow

©Lynne Breitfeller, After the EEG, from Today is Yesterday and Tomorrow

Reservoir Artist Statement:

Today is Yesterday and Tomorrow examines my experience as a caregiver to my parents, both diagnosed with dementia. The work reflects the profound challenges and quiet rewards of caregiving. Over time, one’s sense of self can blur in the constant tending to another’s needs, often bringing isolation.

Being so close to my parents in their later years, I have come to see aging with greater acceptance and to recognize the endurance of their shared life and love despite cognitive decline. The work serves as a reminder that love persists beyond memory loss, and a call to be present even as everything seems to be vanishing.

Lynne Breitfeller is a New Jersey–based photographer. Human relationships, memory and loss, transience, and are recurrent themes in her work.

Instagram: @lynnebreitfellerphoto

ANA LEAL

©Ana Leal

Reservoir Artist Statement:

To Whom It May Concern and It’s Up To You emerge from anonymous responses to the question, “If loneliness were a companion, what would you tell it?” Collected through a globally shared public form, these voices reveal a wide emotional spectrum, from compassion and introspection to resistance and conflict.

To Whom It May Concern unfolds as a contemplative video combining imagery, minimalist music, and spoken fragments, while It’s Up To You takes the form of a triptych that visually stages acceptance, rejection, and the tension between them.

Together, the works invite loneliness to be witnessed and inhabited rather than resolved.

Ana Leal (Recife, 1969) is a visual artist based in São Paulo, with an MFA in Visual Arts from Miami International University of Art & Design and a degree in Photography from Escola Panamericana de Arte e Design. Her work explores time, impermanence, memory, and silence through delicate images that address absence, fragility, and the nearly invisible in nature and everyday life. While rooted in photography, her practice extends to video, installation, objects, monotype, embroidery, and watercolor, moving between documentary and abstraction. She has exhibited internationally, received awards such as the TIFA Gold Award and the Julia Margaret Cameron Award, and works as South America editor for Lenscratch.

Instagram: @analealphoto

JULIA BUTEUX

©Julia Averett Buteux, Have We Said Hello, Potential intall

©Julia Averett Buteux, Have We Said Hello Left Panel

©Julia Averett Buteux, Have We Said Hello Right Panel

Reservoir Artist Statement:

Have We Said Hello is a meditation on loneliness, belonging, and the illusion of separation. Grounded in research on the four forms of loneliness—emotional, social, situational, and chronic—the work reflects on how technology, meant to connect us, often deepens the divide, reducing identity to a surface shaped by comparison and judgment. Social media profile photographs gathered worldwide are stripped of identity and printed on sheer fabric panels, where faint outlines and shifting forms create a web that moves as visitors pass through, accompanied by brief phrases that remind us what it feels like to be seen and acknowledged. Whether the image belonged to a tech executive or someone unhoused, across nations and incomes, the work reveals that when ego and judgment fall away, we rediscover ourselves within a living, invisible web of humanity to which we already belong.

Julia Averett Buteux is a Rhode Island–based photographer whose work focuses on perception and human behavior. Trained as an architect, she brings a structural approach to image-making, using layered imagery and digital processes. She lives and works in Westerly, Rhode Island

Instagram: @jabuteuxphotography

SANDRA KLEIN

©Sandra Klein, ©Rainbow Fish 2025 Archival pigment print with sequins Unique image

©Sandra Klein, Koi 2025 Archival pigment print with sequins Unique image

Reservoir Artist Statement:

Although my memory is of being a happy, creative child, loving home life, I have also felt like an unwelcome foreigner in the outside world.  My landscape imagery portrays my mindfulness and calm in the natural world, while my self-portraiture is often an attempt to understand and bridge that gap I sense between myself and humanity. 

Sandra Klein is an artist whose images, whether captured with a camera or composited, portray a layered world which, though filled with anxiety and trauma, still is rich with joy.  She currently stitches and collages onto her layered photographs. Her images have been shown throughout the United States and abroad and she is represented by Photographic Gallery SMA in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico and Walker Fine Art Gallery in Denver, Colorado.

Instagram: @sandra_klein_photography