Esteemed French poet Charles Baudelaire had an eye for observing the extraordinary in the mundane routine of regular life. He embraced an identity as a “flâneur”- one who observes the hustle and bustle of their surroundings, making a point to capture the unique snapshots which comprise day-to-day existence, often as a means to fight impending boredom.

This photo, taken in the atrium of the Metropolitan Museum of Art on a pleasant Sunday afternoon in February, captures a small group of people who have all decided to sequester themselves in their own worlds, away from the cacophony of New York City. While the typical experience of flânerie is the observation of movement, this collection of eccentric looking individuals stands out for the opposite reason, as they are some of the only stationary living beings in an environment that is constantly in motion. While each person captured in this image seems quite committed to solitude, there is a strong sense of unspoken unity in this cause, as everyone ensures to keep to themselves, failing to notice the colorful oddity of the others in their immediate vicinity for what feels like eternity.

As Baudelaire writes in his poem “Crowds”, “The man who loves to lose himself in a crowd enjoys feverish delights that the egoist locked up in himself as in a box, and the slothful man like a mollusk in his shell, will be eternally deprived of.” The irony could not be clearer in this photo; while each curious individual in this scene is observed by the flaneur capturing this moment, playing a role in enhancing the flâneur’s experience of staving off ennui, they are oblivious to the flânerie opportunity of their own, one that is right in front of them.