These portraits were made over FaceTime during the first months of Covid-19. Sheltered in our respective homes, the subject and myself made the photograph separately, but together.
In a July 1996 piece in The New York Times Magazine, William Gibson talks about the “test pattern” of early television: a target-like device that was broadcast for calibration purposes but which people actually gathered around to watch. This was the era when watching television was purely a leisure activity; the modes of production were shut down for the day and the average american could simply tune in and turn off.
But this relationship changed as we became “postindustrial creatures of an information economy,” to quote Gibson again. We became aware that accessing and utilizing media was instead a type of work. Now we can hardly afford the luxury for leisure: to be successful is to be chronically busy, to maximize the technologies that exploit our ability to hyper-connect.
And then Corona. During the unprecedented moment of a modern global pandemic, economies halted and the tools we normally employed to stay busy, connected and productive lacked their usual arenas.
Suddenly and unexpectedly, we had nothing but time. In a sense we were back to a “test pattern” period of the internet. We could re-assess and re-imagine how to use our technologies as tools for connection.
Gibson’s description of the world wide web back in 1996 puts that moment in time perfectly:
“Today, in its clumsy, larval, curiously innocent way, it offers us the opportunity to waste time, to wander aimlessly, to daydream about the countless other lives, the other people, on the far sides of however many monitors in that post-geographical meta-country we increasingly call home.”