How We Spend Our Time

When viewed from an objective place, human beings surrendering their attention to small bright devices is a strangely fascinating trade off. On the one hand, these tiny devices make life easier in extraordinary ways, however as someone who remembers a time before we called these devices a necessity, it’s becoming clear to me that there is a darker reality to this new technological commodity. Modern phones offer us so many benefits, primarily the ability to be “connected” to the world, “connected” to those around us, “connected” to people around the world, an incomprehensibly fast current of information, always available in your pocket. You are more connected, yet simultaneously more hollow. Maybe it’s the sheer volume of information we have access to, or maybe it’s because in a sea of random information, how can we possibly know reality from lies? I wanted to capture images that call attention to the objective behavior of staring at a phone, how this behavior has become problematic, while removing the individuals identity by using the phone’s light to burn a hole in the film negative, leaving only figure in a room with no real identity of it’s own, yet remnants of a personality seen through the environments.