Nomophobia

It is everywhere. The phone has become the heart of our interactions, the centerpiece of our emotions. When we don’t know what to do, we lose ourselves in it. When we feel uneasy, we cling to it. And at night, just before sleep, we check one more time.

Between 2024 and 2025, during long stays in Thailand, Vietnam, Cambodia, and then Hong Kong, I began photographing this gesture, made invisible by its very ubiquity. It was while sorting through my images that I saw it clearly: what looks like an obsession is in fact a necessity. A bond so organic that its slightest disruption — a malfunction, a loss, a moment of forgetting — stirs immediate unease.

Our entire lives now pass through this object, a condition that has become indispensable to our existence. This condition imposed itself upon us. It is the most universal object and gesture of our time. Nomophobia takes the measure of the phenomenon and observes how the excess of demands on our attention has come to sculpt our bodies. It is a posture that transcends age, social class, and borders.

These photographed gestures, in which I too am complicit, speak quietly yet powerfully of our time. The phone has become, in spite of ourselves, an extension of ourselves. It has replaced our letters, our wallets, our newspapers, our Walkmans. It fills every empty moment that once carried us elsewhere.

I had dreamed of a Leica. It took me twenty years to get there. In the meantime, the phone had swallowed the image: we stored, we accumulated, and did nothing with any of it; I felt drowned by this abundance. With my camera, I wanted the act of photographing to become a meaningful gesture once again. An object that serves a single purpose, that does not vibrate, that demands nothing. A tool for deciding, for waiting, for daring. So that the image might once more become a singular encounter.

These images freeze an illusion: that of believing we hold the world in the palm of our hand, while forgetting the staggering resources it requires. They make visible a gesture repeated to the point of automatism, at the heart of a world saturated with flux. We experience this gesture as an eternity, when it is only a stage. Nomophobia is an invitation to suspend time and truly look at it. To capture the posture of our bodies, this silent tilt, this strange gravity, before this way of being in the world transforms once again.