If you go anywhere these days, you’ll see almost everyone staring at their smartphones.
One photographer, covered here in The Atlantic, has created a new series of photographs called “Removed” to capture that phenomenon. Eric Pickersgill shot each picture, a series of everyday events like lying in bed, sitting on the sofa and gathering for dinner, while taking the ubiquitous gadget out of everyone’s hands.
Pickersgill, also a visiting lecturer at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, wrote on his site about the idea for the project, which came about as he sat in a cafe:
“Family sitting next to me at Illium café in Troy, NY is 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.”
Pickersgill’s work has been gathering worldwide attention now, and as he writes on his blog, “I see the contradiction in all of this. I also embrace it. The work is not to damn the use of devices although I think many of us have that feeling regularly. I know its importance as well as its disfunction and like many operate in that odd dissonance that humans are capable of achieving.”
As the Atlantic writes, “The results are a bit sad and eerie—and a reminder, perhaps, to put our phones away.”
Take a look at a few more below, as seen in Pickersgill’s Facebook feed:
