Photos capture just how much our phones disconnect us

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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

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