Photographer Removes Phones From His Images To Show Our Addiction And Alienation
Is your smartphone taking over your life? Eric Pickersgill thinks that it is. His photography project “Removed” does a simple thing: remove mobile phones from pictures of everyday scenes. The result is a lot of people vacantly staring at their own hands as if struck by some major, palm-related revelation. A street goer who is just casually browsing his email suddenly becomes a man horrified at what he did, staring at his bloody limbs in disbelief.
Pickersgill was inspired after seeing family in a cafe that wasn’t interacting with each other because of their phones. “It was one of those moments where you see something so amazingly common that it startles you into consciousness of what’s actually happening and it is impossible to forget,” he wrote on the project website. “I see this family at the grocery store, in classrooms, on the side of the highway and in my own bed as I fall asleep next to my wife. We rest back to back on our sides coddling our small, cold, illuminated devices every night.” Pickersgill has a Master of Fine Arts degree, teaches lectures, makes art and organizes artist networking.
More info: ericpickersgill.com | removed.social | instagram (h/t: ufunk)
The project inspiration came from a chance encounter in a NYC cafe
“Family sitting next to me at Illium café in Troy, NY [was] so disconnected from one another”
“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”
“Dad looks up every so often to announce some obscure piece of info he found online”
“Despite the obvious benefits that these advances in technology have contributed to society, the social and physical implications are slowly revealing themselves”
“In similar ways that photography transformed the lived experience into the photographable, performable, and reproducible experience…”
“…personal devices are shifting behaviors while simultaneously blending into the landscape by taking form as being one with the body”
“This phantom limb is used as a way of signaling busyness and unapproachability to strangers while existing as an addictive force that promotes the splitting of attention between those who are physically with you and those who are not”
Got wisdom to pour?
This is such a smart idea! Removing the physical phones from photos taken of our everyday life! Some of us don’t realise how reliant we are on our phones. This art project really emphases a problem that we face in society that does not really receive enough attention. Many of us acknowledge that we are too dependent on our phones but don’t do anything about it!
Why not check out my blog to see of ways that you could possible “break up with your phone”! dropyourphone.wordpress.com
We’ll that’s opened my eyes,time out and a balanced amount of my internet scrolling from now on,so glad I looked at this I’m not missing out on family time any more,il check phone when alone.
Its not necessarily the internet that is the problem it is how we are using it. We are compulsive and obsessed reaching for our phones instead of our minds. It is a wonderful tool of instantaneous communication however by entering this world we also disconnect with our physical reality. We are staring at artificial screens instead of listening and looking at those around us from the heart.
Put the phone down
Let me ask these people to look at their phones while I snap a picture of them and then sanctimoniously make a spectacle of it on the internet.
Jackass.
constructive!