Quick – how often do you check your iPhone when you’re around other people? When you’re out dining? At home on the couch, maybe watching TV? At the bar? At parties?
If you’re anything like the rest of us, the answer is somewhere between “often” and “far too often.”
Photographer Eric Pickersgill noticed this phenomenon while sitting at a cafe one morning and decided to make some art about it. He calls the project Removed.
“Family sitting next to me at Illium café in Troy, NY is so disconnected from one another,” he wrote at the time. “Not much talking. Father and two daughters have their own phones out. Mom doesn’t have one or chooses to leave it put away. She stares out the window, sad and alone in the company of her closest family.”
To illustrate this sad fact of modern life (and perhaps help the rest of us recognize what’s happening), Pickersgill started photographing people using their devices, and then removing the gadgets from the final photograph.
The North Carolina native creates these large-format prints by setting the scene, then asking his models to stay perfectly still while he removes the gadget from their hands, just before taking the picture.
What results are haunting images that show us how disconnected we all really are when we rely too much on these magical devices, especially when we’re with those we love most.
“The photographs represent reenactments of scenes that I experience daily,” writes Pickersgill. “We have learned to read the expression of the body while someone is consuming a device and when those signifiers are activated it is as if the device can be seen taking physical form without the object being present.”
It’s a brave new world out there, and we need artists like Pickersgill to help us navigate it with our eyes wide open. Check out this short film for more, and be sure to visit his website for even more photos.
Via: Collective Evolution
Rob LeFebvre is an Anchorage, Alaska-based writer and editor who has contributed to various tech, gaming and iOS sites, including 148Apps, Creative Screenwriting, Shelf-Awareness, VentureBeat, and Paste Magazine. Feel free to find Rob on Twitter @roblef, and send him a cookie once in a while; he’ll really appreciate it.
3 responses to “Photos capture just how much our phones disconnect us”
oh sure, staged photos to tout ridiculous technophobic narrative. I’m always amused by professional tech pundits that are essentially self-loathing because they’ve swallowed so much technophobia over the years, and typically from filmmakers who hypocritically make maximum use of technology to bemoan and demonize technology.
I never see anybody interested in what u are doing with the phone.
People tend to see that, “Uh oh, u are starring in a phone, u will go to hell”.
They don’t have a clue if u are talking to loved ones on the other side of the globe, children at a school in another country, your beloved grandma (who learned to handle the internet at 86).
Peeople never have the slightest clue – but they will judge, as soon as they see you “get stuck in that screen”.
I presently have a gf on vacation in another end of Europe, a bunch of friends over the Atlantic (I live in Sweden), sick old parents – I communicate with them all via my iPhone.
I’m getting tired of this old meme, people ignoring each other while they look at the smart phone. I am usually communicating with my loved ones when on my iPhone. People I’d otherwise not see for months.