We Live In A Political World: #280 / The New Intimacy

The photograph above is one of those "worth a thousand words" pictures. I found it illustrating an article by Steve Mollman. Mollman's article was published on August 28, 2019, on the Quartz website, and he begins his article as follows:

Are you reading this on a handheld device? There’s a good chance you are. Now imagine how’d you look if that device suddenly disappeared. Lonely? Slightly crazy? Perhaps next to a person being ignored? As we are 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.

US photographer Eric Pickersgill has created “Removed,” a series of photos to remind us of how strange that pose actually is. In each portrait, electronic devices have been “edited out” (removed before the photo was taken, from people who’d been using them) so that people stare at their hands, or the empty space between their hands, often ignoring beautiful surroundings or opportunities for human connection. The results are a bit sad and eerie—and a reminder, perhaps, to put our phones away.

If you go to Pickersgill's website, you can track down the series of photos he calls "Removed." He provides a lot more examples, in this photographic collection, that seem to indicate that we are ever more attempting to relate to others, and to the world, through an electronic interface, rather than directly.

Would you call that crazy? You might say that!