One New Message

Joseph O. Holmes is a New York-based photographer who often takes the urban atmosphere as starting point for his projects.

His perspective has resulted in some interesting photo series capturing very specific aspects of life in the Big Apple, for instance his NYC X-Mas Tree Vendors project, or the fascinating Workspaces series. Texters, one of Holmes’s latest projects, features the widespread urban phenomenon of individuals busy with their smart and cell phones on the streets of New York, totally focused on sending and receiving messages and not paying attention to their surroundings. Click here to check out the full photo series.

This photo series perfectly captures the phenomenon of what I would call ‘non-presence’. Building upon Marc Augé’s term ‘non-place’, which refers to places of transience that do not hold enough significance to be regarded as ‘places’, such as airports, supermarkets or highways, ‘non-presence’ is a mental state in which people are physically present, but mentally absent, focusing their attention on digital reality.