Capturing Solo Life as Choice, Not Handicap

Remember when post-30s singlehood was your standard-issue, bun-wearing schoolmarm or high-camp Bette Davis? Its male coordinate may have been the slovenly Oscar Madison or, better yet, your achingly at-drift bachelor uncle. Cast to the margins, living single was something curious, ill-defined. Limbo. It was life on pause and thus largely improvised.

More and more, however, with men and women postponing (or simply forgoing) marriage--singlehood isn’t the psychological waiting room that it once was.

Photographer Adrienne Salinger’s new book, “Living Solo” (Andrews McMeel), is a photographic tour through the homes of 50 men and women who, for reasons as diverse as their backgrounds, live alone. Whether their existence is spare or opulent, by choice or by circumstance, Salinger’s approach--looking at living quarters, underscoring individualism--takes single life out of the language of stereotype and shorthand.

“There are more than 25 million of us living alone in this country,” Salinger writes. “Possibly this is the first generation in which living alone is presumed to be a legitimate choice rather than a declaration of defeat.”