Each academic year brings back its lot of full amphitheatres, networks to rebuild and, for many students, a more discreet feeling: that of being alone in the midst of everyone. We don't talk about it, because re-entry is supposed to be synonymous with novelty and energy. However, it is the time when student loneliness remembers most forcefully those who live it.
What the new year wakes up in many students
New city, new housing, new faces: the re-entry is a succession of revivals. For some, it's exciting. For other — scholarship students away from their families, young people breaking up, those who dare not go to others — It's a time when isolation grows in silence. The pace of the courses resumes, the groups form quickly, and it is enough to miss the first weeks of socialization to find themselves at the margin for a whole semester.
What makes student loneliness particularly difficult to spot is that it is rarely visible from outside. An isolated student continues to go to class, return his duties, answer « It's okay. » When asked. Solitude occurs mainly in the dead: meals alone, evenings without a message, weekends without plans.
Student loneliness, a subject we don't dare to name
Student associations and student life services are well aware of this: it is difficult to get someone who is isolated, because the process requires public recognition that we are not doing well. Listening devices exist, but they often assume a first step that many young people cannot take: to ask for help directly.
This is where a detour can be useful. Propose an activity that looks like nothing — a photo session, a workshop, a collective moment — can create a space where speech is freed without having to ask frontally.
Why photography can be an entry point
A portrait session has a peculiarity: it takes a calm time, in one-to-one or small group, during which it does not happen «Officially» Nothing but photography. This frame, precisely because it is light, often allows the conversation to drift away: on what goes, what goes wrong, what has been living since the beginning of the year.
This is not a coincidence: not looking straight into the eyes during the exchange (the look is often turned towards the lens, towards a point, towards a set-up) removes part of the pressure you feel in a frontal conversation. Many people confide more easily next to an activity than face it.
Portrait as a pretext for exchange, not as a purpose
The objective is never to «Make it talk» No, no, no, no. The idea is simpler: create a moment when a person feels seen, in every sense of the word. To be photographed carefully, without judgment, sends a message: « We took the time for you. ». For someone who feels invisible from the start, it's not nothing.
And if the conversation opens naturally during the session, — But that's never the objective. The photographic result remains central: an image that the person can keep, in which he or she recognizes himself or herself, at a time when he or she may not have much else to hold on to visually.
What High Sensitivity Portrait can offer to student associations
This is precisely the type of action that I seek to build with associations and structures that accompany isolated or precarious students, in the continuity of what I already propose to associations like Le Refuge. A group session, or a series of individual sessions, organized directly with a student association or university department, free of charge for the young people concerned.
This type of partnership requires adapting the format to the reality of the public: short slots, a familiar place (the local association rather than an impressive studio), and above all no pressure on the result — There is no «Good» how to stand before the objective.
How an association can ask us
If you are part of a student association, a BDE, a student life service or an accompanying structure and this could make sense for the young people you are accompanying, the easiest way is to contact me directly via the website. portraithighsensitivity.fr To discuss it. The sessions offered to the associations are free of charge: the funding goes through paid sessions with individuals and companies, as well as donations received on the site.
Student loneliness does not settle with a single photo shoot. But every gesture that reminds someone that it counts can be part of a broader set of answers — And that's exactly where I want to put this project.
