The attention you're paying your screen right now—and while you endlessly scroll through Facebook, emails, Netflix, and Instagram—is the subject of a new photo series from French photographer Antoine Geiger, SUR-FAKE. What appear to be casual snapshots of people going about their phone-addicted lives become sinister, Dementor-from-Harry-Potter-like scenarios under his digital paintbrush. That's right, your face is getting sucked right off your head and into the single object that absorbs more of our time than sleep.
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"The project came spontaniously," Geiger tells The Creators Project. "All of a sudden I would be on the metro or in the museum and feel on my own while it's crowded. I could literaly see people's faces melting on their screens, like their identity was being lost in the non-space of technology, like the spacial dimension of the present has been outstretched." A bit of post-processing in Photoshop, and his eerie feeling was visualized. The result is similar to the work of Italian photographer Max Cavallari, whose work you can check out here.In the context of a related series called SUR-FACE, this might not necessarily be a bad thing. "I’ve always been attracted by images of anonymity, hidden faces and expressions. It is something that touches me aesthetically," he writes of the previous work. The same anonymity is present in SUR-FAKE, though the distorted anatomy of his subject makes it a little more horrifying. "The screen works just like a cigarette, a Ventolin refill our a fresh bottle of water. It is about the reflex," he says. So the real question posited by the new photos seems to be, "Is surrendering our identities to technology really so bad?"Check out the series below.
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