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| I was seated at the theater and I saw this older man a few rows ahead examining phone. The glow of the screen was compelling. I saw the familiar masonry grid of a phone gallery. All things this old man, who I don’t even know has seen and thought important to document despite never sharing. |
It struck me how universal this is, that is how everyone’s phone gallery looks. Of all the aspects of records kept on everyone’s phones, this is very personal. It’s very different than a social media timeline, though likely a subset of the data.
I’m just thinking about the layers and layers of thumbnails. And so much of it is unseen, which is the reason why society seems so false, particularly in the heavily curated social media space.
I’ve always been interested in this underbelly of media. It’s like the hidden, the edits, the deleted these all seem to make up so much more than what we think of as “the crystalized form.” In a book, or a message, just thinking of the thoughts, and discards. It’s like each book in itself in an invisible library that surrounds it.
When I visited England this other old man asked me if he wanted to see pictures of his engines. I said sure, presuming some album would emerge. But he came back to me with a point and shoot camera, probably from the early 2000s. Without a usual phone gallery, what happened was he scrolled through all of his photos linearly in sequence. I saw his grandchildren grow up in reverse, and all of these moments that were mostly insignificant to me but meant the world to him.
I did appreciate this. There is a candid directness to this use. I’d be hesitant to allow anyone access to my phone, even thinking I don’t really have anything suspect on it. But for a certain group, they’ll just give free use.
Someone you didn’t know
I had this thought about looking through photos and finding someone I didn’t know. Like if we collectively had a friend in high school, and they just were forgotten by everyone. Now we are more distanced from school. I can’t hold the face of everyone in my head, and even people who were somewhat close I’ll not recall immediately.
I was thinking of it more in this abstract horror kind of way though. Like as if that old English man suddenly found mysterious faces in his SD card, but with alarming sense of familiarity on their faces as they watched the photographer.