Noel Camardo
cellphone
cellphone
A palpable yet hushed uneasiness, the solemn-faced, suit-clad, hirsute Victorian Man collected among his peers, and crescented around Alexander Graham Bell placing the first phone call between New York and Chicago. One hundred and twenty-two years later, the photo, taken by Gilbert H. Grosvenor, and held in the Library of Congress, is almost comedic for its drama. What catastrophic results were those men anticipating? Some look like they thought the phone itself would explode, and injure spectators. Others that Bell himself was out of his mind. (Was he?). And others still that the end of civilization was now, as predicted in scripture, a sure-and-proven thing. Unquestionably, those watching the first call between New York-Chicago couldn’t have foreseen that the phone itself would one day become a portable device which would double as an information-hole large enough to transport everything of what we know in our pockets, or, that they would be available to all people, including those who had, seemingly, not enough to pay for lunch that day. Or that phone-events, not so dissimilar to the one of Alexander Graham Bell making his 1000-mile call, choreographed and yet filled with very real human feeling, would occur all these years later when the latest model of phone was made available for purchase. In these modern-day scenes, of course, we see images very different than the one captured in Grosvenor’s picture. In particular, that of people gathered by the hundreds (and the collective worldwide millions), eagerly waiting for something. Which, in itself, is always shocking, and always captivating, and leaves one asking: What’s going on? Is everything okay? Why are so many people lined up? What are they after? At last, we hear that it all concerns a new phone, and are we surprised? Certainly Alexander Graham Bell would have taken pleasure in seeing the image of so many people lined up to purchase a phone. But what would the inventor have made of Noel Camardo’s photo series cellphone, in which our historically recent and entirely obvious over-reliance to the phone is put on display? In Camardo’s city-scenes, in which the backdrop is the streets of New York, no human act, whether that of occupying a street corner, or waiting for the bus, or walking, or searching with one’s eyes, or even begging, is without a phone. As in life, the phone is always there, shaping, or deciding behavior. A person is never just a person, but a person with a phone, touching, listening to, reading on, talking into, a phone. A face is not just a face, but a face staring into a phone, receiving new information from a phone. People aren’t simply walking beside one another, but simultaneously engaging with some distant place via a phone. In some images, many people are seen to be at once on phones. With these photographs the eye has the tendency to start at the foreground, and move slowly back, and back, counting up the number of phone-busy people. Three of three in one photo. Four of four in another. Ten of twelve in yet another. Then in one photo, a woman is seen using two phones at once. The expression on her face is one of intense worry, with the brow knitted, and the lips turned down, and eyes narrowed. What crisis is this? What will happen next for her? But how would she have looked if she hadn’t had a phone, let alone two phones, on her person? Would she have been differently disposed to the moment? And what would Alexander Graham Bell conclude about the image of this distressed woman? Would he have recognized the phone’s role in the scene as good? bad? But that if at first he had learned how this woman derived from a culture so reliant on phones that the population could hardly act without one? could hardly use the bathroom, get into bed, leave the home, work, eat, travel a single street, or talk to one’s family and friends, without his or her phone? What would he have made of the image of this woman then? Though we cannot make any conclusions there, surely Bell would have been loathe to find in the photo of his New York-Chicago call one, or likely many people, using a phone, talking, texting, or video-gaming, stock-watching, arranging drink dates with nearby strangers, checking social media, liking some acquaintances contribution to the endless stream of words and images that funnel like livestock down through the system, or in any way dividing the sense of the momentousness of his event. He would have to say, Put your phones away. Please! wouldn’t he? But looking from Grosvenor’s photo down through Camardo’s series, one begins to ask very basic questions about one’s relationship with the phone. Such as: Why do I feel I can’t leave my home without my phone? And why do I return long distances to my home in order to get my phone when I have forgotten it on the bedside table? Why can’t I be at ease sitting alone without looking at my phone? Perhaps Bell would say that all of these things are nothing to be concerned about, that they are simply a matter of service. Which is why we hear it said: I don’t have any service. I need service. The service is lousy. If I go outside, maybe I’ll get better service. But what frustration if we cannot get this service. What an instant loss of power. What helplessness. What fear. What nausea. What faintness. What doubt. What a sinking losing feeling. We think, I can’t live without my phone. And yet what can’t we really live without? Air, water, food, cover from the elements. Human company, most of us. One begins to wonder then not what we have gained with the phone, but what we have given up, and who is now in control: Us? Or, it? -Julian Tepper
