Matthew Pillsbury : Screen Lives

According to a recent report, the average American spends four hours daily watching television. In a culture where we seldom read the same books or see the same exhibitions or movies, television programs are often the rare common experience we share.  When you consider the additional time we spend facing computer screens at work or for leisure, the number of hours spent in the glow of luminescent screens is staggering.

 

In my photographs, I work to capture the experience of that time, both physically and psychologically. Inspired by Hiroshi Sugimoto's photographs of movie theatre screens, I make long exposure black and white photographs of people watching television and working at their computer.  The resulting images show glowing white screens and rooms dramatically lit by a single source. In addition, each long exposure captures the evanescent record of the human activity in the room. While this technique deprives us of the individual likenesses of my subjects, a different kind of photographic portrait emerges from the presentation of the personal objects in the room, rendered in minute detail through the use of an 8x10 camera. With the room's inhabitants somewhat physically absent, the photographs edge toward the voyeuristic; the viewer enters private spaces and can linger over the smallest details of these very specific interior landscapes. 

 

The photographs not only document these spaces, but also allow viewers to address a conundrum that technology has interjected into our lives; at the same time that we have been given the possibility of instant global communication, we find ourselves increasingly isolated from each other physically.  Each of the images in this series is an open-ended reflection of our complex and evolving relationships to technology, culture, and to each other.

 

- Matthew Pillsbury