Yesterday I went to see the Lee Miller exhibition at Camera here in Turin (for the second time). It was a good show, with nice pictures and nice tension, that Lee Miller carried from the fashion world into war.

What really struck me wasn’t one of her photographs, but it was watching people watching her photographs through their phones.

There was specifically a lady that took a picture of every photograph at the exhibition. Like xerox copies, as if the goal was to leave with a backup of the exhibition.

I don’t get the point in going to an exhibition to experience it through a phone, you can find the same images online in two minutes.

Maybe it’s the habit of documentation. Maybe it’s the need to prove that we’ve been somewhere. We’ve trained ourselves to look at the world mediated by a screen, even when the original is right in front of us. Yesterday I went to see the Lee Miller exhibition at Camera here in Turin (for the second time). It was a good show, with nice pictures and nice tension, that Lee Miller carried from the fashion world into war.

What really struck me wasn’t one of her photographs, but it was watching people watching her photographs through their phones.

There was specifically a lady that took a picture of every photograph at the exhibition. Like xerox copies, as if the goal was to leave with a backup of the exhibition.

I don’t get the point in going to an exhibition to experience it through a phone, you can find the same images online in two minutes.

Maybe it’s the habit of documentation. Maybe it’s the need to prove that we’ve been somewhere. We’ve trained ourselves to look at the world mediated by a screen, even when the original is right in front of us.