Alone With Everybody. My New Photography Book.

I've spent a long time walking streets with a camera, and the question that has always nagged at me is a simple one… are we really together when we're together?

That question is at the heart of my new photography book, Alone With Everybody.

Front cover of Alone With Everybody, the new photobook © Vincent S. Coster 2026

The title is a nod to Charles Bukowski, whose poetry explored the strange loneliness of being human in a world that makes genuine connection so difficult. If that difficulty was real in his era, it has only intensified in ours. We sit across from friends in cafés staring at our phones. We stand at the top of mountains and photograph them rather than simply standing there. People surround us, and somehow we are still very much on our own.

But Alone With Everybody isn't a condemnation of that. I'm not interested in lecturing anyone about technology or modern life. The role of a photographer, as I see it, is to act as a filter and to record the world as it is, without judgment and without agenda, so that the viewer can bring their own feelings to what they see.

The photographs in this book were taken in town centres, GAA grounds, bus stops, café windows, supermarket aisles, and hillsides. They are colour, street-level, and entirely unposed. What I was after was what I think of as the real decisive moment, not the technically perfect shot, but the split second where one life intersects with another. The moment you happen to be there, and they happen to be there, and the camera records it. Brief and often meaningless, and yet somehow those are the moments that last.

One of the great privileges of shooting street photography is the unexpected human contact it brings. We all look at old photos and wish we could be in those times, but now is beautiful even as it feels commonplace and ugly. This book is my attempt to show how modern life is beautiful but also lonely.

It's not for likes. It's not for the algorithm. It's just for looking.

Alone With Everybody is available on June 1st 2026.

© Vincent S. Coster 2026