Exploring Solitude and Technology on Liverpool’s 79 Bus

I took this photograph of my good friend Paul sitting on the 79 Liverpool bus, absorbed in his phone. His concentration on the phone creates a remarkably private moment within a public space. As a street photographer years ago I might once have photographed someone reading a newspaper, a book, or looking out of a bus window.

The bus is moving through Liverpool, but Paul is stationary within it. The outside world is reduced to indistinct shapes and reflections through the windows.

Meanwhile, the phone contains an entirely different temporal world of messages, news, social media, information and photographs.

So three forms of time coexist: the physical journey of the bus, the immediate moment of the photograph and the digital world inside the phone. Paul is physically surrounded by other people and the architecture of public transport, but psychologically he appears somewhere else. The bright rectangle of the phone becomes a little window into another world. So my photograph of Paul sitting on a bus looking at his phone is perhaps a meditation on age, technology, solitude, public space and everyday urban life.

Paul would probably say “No Phil it’s just a photo of me on the bus!”