Photographer captures the eerie reality of our smartphone addiction

We’d all look pretty weird to someone who stepped out of a time machine from, oh, any era before the 1990s. With no screens to actually look at, the subjects staring down into their hands only underlines Pickersgill’s point that these devices undoubtedly alienate us rather than keep us connected.

Not wanting to take photos of random people and edit the phones out, which he felt would be exploitative, he had people pose as though holding a device for the series, called “Removed” which might sound crude were it not for the mildly terrifying incident that led to the idea.

Are you reading this on a handheld device?

“One morning I noticed this family eating breakfast together where they were all sharing the same physical space however they were engaging with people and content elsewhere”, he explained. And if you think it’s bad among millennials, kids in their preteens or younger have been reported as having real withdrawal and serious mood swings when going as little as a few days without their Wi-Fi-enabled pseudo-limb that connects them to the outside world at all times.

“I knew that I didn’t want to make photographs of people just using the devices”, the snapper told the Houston Chronicle.

“I didn’t make that picture, but it exists in my mind as an image – a very emotionally charged image”, he wrote in a statement to Mashable.

The whole series can be viewed on Pickersgill’s official ‘Removed’ site.

Pickersgill began staging scenes of people in everyday situations where they’d usually be on their phone – then he removed the actual phones from the pictures.