People on their phones. Completely absorbed into their screens, or carrying on conversations with invisible people while traversing public spaces. It is so ordinary, so pedestrian, nothing compels the eye to take a second look. Personally my instinct has always led me to turn my eyes away out of politeness – as I do when I see people doing things in public they’d rather go unobserved. On a sensory level I find the proliferation of the smart phone a sad thing for anyone who loves humanity – it has all but eradicated eye contact, and made people isolated and boring to the stranger’s gaze.
This idea was born on E. 86th street, one late autumn dusk. I was on a call with a friend, having ducked into a cargo doorway to wait out the conversation before going into a store. It was rush hour and throngs of people were walking away from the subway. I wasn’t people watching, as the conversation was fun and absorbing, but my eyes were idly scanning the grey river of humanity flowing past, muted by twilight. Out of this mass something pierced through to my unconscious eye which didn’t make sense: A disembodied baby face floating through the darkness, glowing bright in a ghostly white light, nearing. The image was stark enough to snap me out of my zone and take notice, if only to explain to myself what it is I’m seeing. It was a parent wearing a front-facing baby sling, who was looking at their phone as they walked with the grey stream of people. The position of the device was aligned with the baby’s face, no more than two inches away from it, illuminating it significantly brighter than anything else around. The image is emblazoned in my brain more vibrantly than any photograph can catch, and it brought to the surface of my mind a buried curiosity. Maybe the point isn’t to politely turn away, but to start looking. And photographing.
To witness people’s faces and body language when they are on their phones – something we all are now – is an unexpectedly intimate experience. I wonder if people know just how naked they are to the eye when absorbed in their phones. We forget about our faces and bodies, and everything they communicate. We forget about where we are and our relationship to what’s around us. Our attention is pulled into a virtual place invisible to anyone else, and our bodies slump into a utilitarian position, the sole aim of which is to hold the phone in a comfortably readable way.
To the observer’s eye, people absorbed in their phones always look somehow pasted on, rather than a part of, the world around them. Bodies passively slump into a hunched position, faces usually trained to maintain a façade suddenly become completely honest, and there is no apparent relationship between subject and context. People look uncomfortably dropped into their surroundings, rather than a dynamic part of them. Usually, this also results in an automatic justified light source – music to the cinematographer – perfectly lighting the eyes, and highlighting the unguarded expression of the face. This is where the inner life of a person becomes visible to the naked eye in a flash of light.
This will be a still photography project of studying – as my eye has been doing for a while now – my fellow humans’ changing presence in the world. Where are their minds while their bodies blindly move among each other, how those bodies exist in the surrounding world, and what it all means for the greater Us. As our anatomy, brains, and relationships change with this sudden technological advancement, so ubiquitous I almost missed it, it’s worth noticing and capturing what it looks and feels like to a fellow human, now.
