People on their phones are the easiest thing there is to photograph and the hardest thing to say anything new about, everybody has that picture, I have hundreds of them. What I noticed putting these six together is that I am not photographing a phone at all. The phone is the one thing in the frame you cannot see into, a black rectangle, what I am photographing is a body that has arranged itself around it, the neck, the hands, the shoulders, and that body is the person now. I am my phone. So are they, and so am I the minute I put the camera down.
Three Ways to Hold It
A kid in a grey beanie crossing a plaza parking lot in the GTA with the phone held in both hands like a small book, thumbs going, head down at a right angle, chains swinging off his trousers, walking a straight line across a lot full of cars without once looking up. A man in a blue shirt and sunglasses on a bench outside a restaurant, folded in half over his, elbows on his knees, the whole window behind him full of sky and trees and he is looking at four inches of glass. A man in a red jacket on a bench under a Seniors’ Day poster, working a knot out of his earbuds, and the couple in the poster are laughing at each other over his head. They are the only two people in all six of these pictures looking at anybody!
People on Their Phones Do Not See You
Street photography used to be about catching people before they noticed the camera. Now they do not notice the street. I walked up to within six feet of the kid in the beanie, took two frames and walked on, and I am fairly sure he never knew I was there. That is not a skill I developed, it is a skill he lost, and I have not decided how I feel about using it. I use it anyway. People on their phones give you the unguarded moment for nothing, they are not unguarded because they trust you, they are unguarded because as far as they are concerned you are not there, and neither is the van, or the traffic, or the woman coming the other way.
The Booth
The picture I started this post from is the woman in the booth. Headphones on, one hand pressed flat against the side of her head, a drink with a striped straw, her glasses folded on the table, and the phone down by her knee in the other hand, not even up. She is listening to something and looking at nothing. Behind her in the next booth a couple, both on theirs, not looking at each other. Three people in a room built for talking, three phones, nobody talking. I took it from a chair across the floor at f/2.5 in the evening light coming through the window, and in black and white because the colour in that room was doing nothing for anybody.
Outside, the same evening, a man was crouched at the base of a brick pillar with his phone and his hand over his mouth, the way you sit when the call is not good news, or when you have just read something you did not want to read, or when you are simply out of the wind. I do not know which. I did not go closer. Some pictures you take from where you stand and leave the person alone.
The One in the Back Pocket
The last frame is a busy Toronto corner, condo towers going up behind, three young women waiting for the light with their backs to me, and a phone in the back pocket of a pair of jeans. It is the only phone in the set nobody is looking at. And coming the other way across the crossing, a woman with hers to her ear, talking, and smiling, which makes her the one person on a phone in this whole set who looks glad to be on it.
All of these are the Leica Q3, 28mm, available light, over about sixteen months and four different days across Toronto and the GTA. Three are colour and three are black and white and I did not decide which was which until I had them on the screen, which a purist will tell you is the wrong way round, and it is the way I do it. The plaza frames stayed in colour for the red jacket and the poster. The coffee shop and the corner went to black and white because the shapes were the picture. There is more of this kind of thing in my street photography projects, and there will be more of these, because I am not going to stop, and neither are they.
Thanks for looking!
