All images ©Kelly Shimoda (Click to enlarge)
I guess you don’t want to talk to me anymore is a project by Kelly Shimoda which, as she explains, "serves to document mobile phone text messages and preserve a form of communication that is fleeting by design and rarely seen by anyone other than the original author or intended recipient. Taken as a whole, it also begins to ask deeper questions about human communication.
Because people can use texting to avoid the most uncomfortable parts of face-to-face interaction, they often feel liberated to spontaneously communicate intimate and revealing thoughts, but by being forced to encapsulate those thoughts in a mere 160 characters, the best messages read like haiku poems – brief, but full of meaning.
In my approach to shooting and editing the messages, the project becomes an informal sociological study, creating an intimate yet fragmentary portrait of a disparate network of people.
In the end, these enigmatic photographs ask as many questions as they answer, and force the reader to reflect and draw upon his or her own experience to make sense of them, ultimately pointing to the fundamentally fragile nature of human communication."
Kelly has been working as a documentary photographer since graduating from the International Center of Photography in 2005. She freelances for The New York Times, and a variety of European magazines. She was included in the 2008 PDN Photo Annual and won an award in the ASMP Image08 contest for her work on the last days of the Empire Roller Skating Centre. In 2007, she was among the winners of Hey, Hot Shot! at the Jen Bekman Gallery, and also received an ICP/ Johnson & Johnson Fellowship. In 2006, she was awarded an Honorable Mention in The Magenta Foundation’s Emerging Photographers.
