A photographer edits out our smartphones to show our strange and lonely new world.
Ever since the iPhone 6S came out, it’s been hard for users everywhere to put it down and join the human ranks. With every new Snapchat filter and Instagram update it becomes increasingly more difficult to set aside our devices and reconnect with the world around us. And the result is glassy-eyed children sat back to back with their oblivious parents, friends totally disconnected from each another, couples spooning their smartphones instead of one another. ‘Despite the obvious benefits that these advances in technology have contributed to society, the social and physical implications are slowly revealing themselves,’ Eric writes on his website. Pickergill told E! about what inspired him to create the photos. “The series began when I was at an artist residency in upstate New York last year, just a few weeks after getting married,” he said. “I spent the mornings working at this little cafe and one morning I noticed this family eating breakfast together where they were all sharing the same physical space however they were engaging with people and content elsewhere and maybe it was the beautiful light and the mother who wasn’t using a device that made me see the situation as a photograph.”
As we’re sucked in ever more by the screens we carry around, even in the company of friends and family, the hunched pose of the phone-absorbed seems increasingly normal. In each portrait, electronic devices have been edited out so that people stare at their hands, or the empty space between their hands, often ignoring beautiful surroundings or opportunities for human connection. This has never happened before and I doubt we have scratched the surface of the social impact of this new experience. ‘The image of that family, the mother’s face, the teenage girls’ and their father’s posture and focus on the palm of their own hands has been burned in my mind,’ he explains.
