Life outside the screen
Whether at home or at work, we spend an awful lot of time in front of a screen. Photographer Matthew Pillsbury was staggered to learn that the average American spends four hours a day watching TV; in addition to which most of us spend huge chunks of the day looking at a computer screen.
In each of Pillsbury's images, a luminescent screen glows brightly in a corner, all detail obliterated by a long exposure. The human presence is but a fleeting and ghostly thing: either mesmerised by the screen, or simply reliant on its reassuring presence while getting on with other tasks. Their wispy outlines sink into their environments.
Shown in their swanky but cluttered New York apartments, or in offices in which floor-to-ceiling windows offer spectacular views of the Manhattan skyline at night, these stylish black-and-white shots suggest an ambivalence to busy lifestyles in thrall to technology, making them appear at once enviable and depressingly anonymous.
On a less ambivalent note, Pillsbury has also taken pictures in New York's Natural History Museum, where the extinct species look more alive and enduring than the spectral humans on view. A dinosaur skeleton appears in open-jawed menace, surrounded by visitors who are a mere blur of indistinct heads.
Until Jan 15, Michael Hoppen Contemporary, 3 Jubilee Place SW3, Tue to Sat noon to 6pm, free. Tel: 020 7352 4499. Tube: Sloane Square
