Alone Together gathers a body of photographs Martino Marangoni made in public places, where the individual stands exposed yet unacknowledged. The book takes its title from that paradox: contemporary urban space, and especially the glass-walled architecture built for maximum visibility, is designed to be seen through, yet it teaches those inside it to ignore one another and to expect to be left alone. Marangoni photographs without meeting his subjects’ eyes, holding back so that private expression survives in surroundings that are often unfriendly and occasionally menacing.

The project has an autobiographical spine. Marangoni grew up in Florence, where the line between public and private life was sharply drawn—behaviour in the piazza was noticed and commented upon, while other things happened behind closed doors. Moving to New York in the 1970s, he found a different relationship between strangers in a shared space: an indifference that felt at once like freedom from judgement and freedom to look. Photography gave that impulse a form. He describes the pointing finger and the pointing camera as related gestures, both drawing the attention of others.

Rob van Hoesel designed the volume, and the publisher frames it as an inquiry into how architecture shapes the terms of privacy rather than as a documentary survey of any single city. Its concern is the beauty Marangoni finds in contemporary buildings and the isolation those same buildings produce. The co-publication with Danilo Montanari Editore in 2014 places the book within a small-press European practice attentive to the photograph as a printed object.

Collectors drawn to photographic sequences that argue through accumulation rather than anecdote will find the book’s structure of interest: 102 pages in a generous 24 × 30 cm hardcover, sized so that the figure in the crowd and the space around it can be read together. Van Hoesel’s design is integral to that reading, and Marangoni’s sustained attention to strangers is the book’s real subject.