In his 2017 talk at TEDx Pasadena, Ryan Pfluger described photography as a “salve for loneliness.” Growing up, the photographer battled depression, which came from his family life and early challenges coming to terms with his sexuality. Photography became a means to cope with his anxiety, specifically around social interaction. “I’ve never been the kind of photographer that approaches people on the street or immerses myself within a community,” Pfluger says. “My own social anxieties got in the way of that.” Instead, when he was in graduate school at the School of Visual Arts in New York City, he used the internet to find men in Brooklyn to photograph, and ultimately used his camera to facilitate interactions that might otherwise be uncomfortable.
© Ryan Pfluger
The camera grew into a tool not only to interact with strangers but to reconnect with his estranged father on a cross-country road trip where he made intimate, emotive portraits along the way. In one of these images, Pfluger and his father lay head first on separate, parallel hotel beds. His father, shirtless, stares off, somewhere in thought, while Pfluger confronts the camera and viewer head-on. It’s a breakthrough image, one that not only suggests Pfluger’s internal monologue but perhaps foreshadows his work to come.
Describing himself as extremely introverted, Pfluger continues to live a fairly solitary life, preferring his relationships to be one on one, which he says, “can get very lonely.” Like his early work with internet strangers and his father, photography has helped Ryan to overcome this on a professional level. He channels his own uneasiness into a mechanism that gets his subjects—whether they’re common people posing for a personal project, or celebrities like Tilda Swinton, Cat Power, and Billie Joe Armstrong, or even President Barack Obama—to open up. “It’s ironic for sure,”Pfluger says, “predominantly being a portrait photographer but being uncomfortable around people in general.”
Pfluger’s recent travels over the past few years have shown him that discomfort can be universal. “There is an underlying feeling of being misunderstood or lacking in community or not feeling like your home is where you should be,” he says. “I think we forget how the simplest of acts, of being kind to a stranger and taking the moment to make some feel special in a non-transactional experience can really go a long way.”
Michele Usher 