Exploring Isolation Through Urban Photography
I took this photograph from a rooftop overlooking Hanbury Street during a party celebrating the opening of the East End Film Festival in 2010. From that elevated vantage point I had an unusual bird’s-eye view of the street below. The image became, for me, a photograph about mobility, digital culture, and changing patterns of urban life.
A laptop is conventionally associated with desks, cafés, offices, or at least moments of pause. Here, however, it becomes integrated into movement itself — computing while walking through the street. In 2010 this looked especially strange and faintly futuristic, because mobile internet culture was still in transition. The woman had originally been sitting on the pavement using the laptop, and I was surprised to see her continue working on it when she suddenly stood up and hurried away. Smartphones already existed, but many people still depended on full laptops for serious connectivity, work, media, and communication.
I think the photograph now has a prophetic quality. Today, seeing people absorbed in devices while moving through cities is entirely normal — phones dominate attention everywhere. Yet the laptop makes the behaviour visible in a more exaggerated and theatrical way. It externalises something that has since become socially invisible: the demand for constant digital engagement. That engagement can isolate people from their immediate surroundings and dull observational awareness. In this photograph, the street itself has become an office.
Hanbury Street, Spitalfields 2014.
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