My phone currently tells me how many hours I’ve been using it on average per day and the numbers are staggering (this is a running joke about Geminis). My main day-to-day camera has become my phone, despite my futile attempts otherwise. I own more cameras than I can count and I still revert to this one because it’s the one thing I carry all the time. I can shoot DNG raw files and edit them within an app with the same degree of nuance as I could by sitting at a desk. Why fight it any longer?
But there’s more. As we move toward a society immersed with wearable technology and a never-disappearing cell signal, what we see on our screens will (and has, whether we like it or not) also become part of the human experience. If you spend several hours per day immersed in text messages and Instagram and Wikipedia and Reddit they inevitably become part of your life story. The lines between tech and “IRL” have blurred and will continue to blur and maybe one day they will be irrevocably interwtwined. These possibilities have made me question the very nature of reality itself.
I’ve had dreams about people and have woken up to see they’ve texted me while I was sleeping. Our brains produce electricity. Everything is connected.
A screenshot is just the phone camera turned inward, a picture of something you’re experiencing that’s just as real and a part of the tapestry of our life as the physical world around you. It was really fun to mix the traditional “outward” nature of photography and this “inner” world of screenshots in one project and I’m really happy with how it turned out. 58 pages of weirdness. Or maybe there is nothing out of the ordinary at all.