Am I lonely? Is a question that I have been asking myself a lot lately. But I have more friends and family messaging me in the past few weeks than over the past few years. But without a single message from one person, I feel lonely. Break ups can be a hard time, especially in the recent world of technology. Where we get used to so much contact with one another that can span over years which can be ripped away in an instant, with nothing to replace that void. For me Snapchat has been the void that I have not been able to fill since the break up, which sounds silly how superficial and how much significance I generate around one app. But when my life changed from having someone that I could send all these random photos of my unfolding life to in an instant, I felt lonely.
This project is a continuation of that void and a journey of if or when this will heal over, the photographs captured for this project have no wider significance than just the ‘photos that I wanted to send to you’. This project speaks masses about the current state of our youth and how times are changing even within some of the most fundamental building of a person that occurs within everyone.
The power social media has over youths mental and social health is so incredibly vast, I personally have felt both of these deteriorate since the breakup due to social media. The constructed pain of not knowing what someone is doing when this was never my business in the first place but the freedom of social media and the constant oversharing that is represented within constructs being shut out as a painful experience. This should have never been mine. However, social media creates a high level of importance for oversharing. This construct makes us feel important that we are let into someone’s internet lives but this is not real, for some reason the absence of having this makes us feel shut out and lonely that we cannot see what is going on in someone else’s fake life.
These photos that I have captured span over many weeks, the images captured are of situations that I would have sent due to them reminding me of the past relationship. Alongside these photos I have kept a journal where almost daily I would write what I was thinking, feeling and what I wanted to say to my ex. Here I have presented the first page of each day that I wrote, alongside the corresponding image that I took this day.