The Digital Reminiscence series was created to bring awareness to our lives being presented to us in a mostly digital landscape. Ever since the iPhone was released into our lives, there has been a desire to take photos of our experiences without actually living them. What do I mean by that? How many times have you seen people take photos of their food and post to social media without ever going back to them and enjoying the time they had with friends and family. How many times have you personally gone on a walk and saw something nice, then stopped and took a photo of it then left without paying much attention to the actual object of interest. What Digital Reminiscence does is point out this notion of what you see through a digital lens is not what is actually happening in real life. In a way, this series points at the human experience of experiencing what life actually has to offer, not what a photo can offer. It’s about the real life experiences you have with friends, family, pets, and even your environment.
Through the use of black and white images faded and blurred into the background, I make it seem as though the images were taken in the background of the iPhone and it’s encapsulated image. In fact, all the photos in this series are a composite of 3 images: 1 image of the hand and iPhone, another of the background, and the image inside the iPhone screen. The three come together to form a seamless story of the human experience seen through a digital interface. Many of the photos in the background were taken a long time before iPhones were created, thus creating a sense of a time where moments mattered in real time more than after the fact on a screen. By making the background image and iPhone black and white while having the image within the phone full color, a sense of importance is placed on the colored image. However, the cropping is also quite odd compared to the carefully curated image behind. This cropping creates the idea of what you see on a phone is never as good as the real life moment, and the digital interface you interact with never shows you the full picture.
