Urban Grief

The Telephone

I often walk past this old phone box and feel a strange pull to capture it. It feels like a relic from another life a time when our connections with people were slower, more thoughtful, and more real. We didn’t have a dozen ways to speak at once. We had a few. And we used them with more care.

Now, we live in a world of instant expression. Social media gives us endless ways to speak, but it’s also made it easier than ever to lose people. One post, one comment, one misunderstood moment, and suddenly someone you cared about is gone. Blocked. Deleted. As if they never existed.

And that’s where the grief comes in. Not the kind that’s obvious or acknowledged, but a quiet, isolating kind. You feel it when someone vanishes from your digital world without a word. It’s not a death, but it feels like one. There’s no goodbye, no closure just absence.

This phone box reminds me of that. It stands there, unused and falling apart. A symbol of how we once stayed connected in ways that required effort, presence, and patience. And how today, in a world full of noise, we’re more disposable to each other than ever before.

Bombarded

What I see in this image is more than just urban decay, it’s a portrait of the world we live in now.

I see a society where we are constantly bombarded by media, advertising, messaging, and noise. A world where we’re expected to adapt to illusions, to mould ourselves into versions that suit the system, just to survive. We’re overstimulated, overexposed, and slowly disconnected from what’s real.

That’s the rat race I try to capture in my photography, not just the physical chaos, but the emotional and spiritual cost of it.

What strikes me most, though, is not just the overload, but the loss of love. Love today feels like a product, something filtered, marketed, and made to fit a brand or lifestyle. The kind of love where two souls simply see one another feels not just lost, but frowned upon. And yet, I believe deep down, many people are still longing for it. They don’t always know it, but it’s there. A desire for something real beneath the noise.

This photo, for me, is about that grief. The grief of love being shaped by media expectations, of innocence becoming obsolete. And yet, beneath all the layers and screaming colours, I still sense that longing, for connection without performance, for love that doesn’t need to be liked or shared, just felt.

Philosophers like Adorno, Horkheimer, and Marcuse warned of this decades ago, that capitalism doesn’t just control our economy, but hijacks our very consciousness. They saw how media and advertising begin to shape our perception of reality itself, creating illusions that we have to conform to.

Byung-Chul Han, a voice I resonate with deeply, describes this not as physical violence but as neuronal violence, an age where our minds are constantly overstimulated, leading to burnout, emotional detachment, and a quiet kind of collapse.

But this isn’t their theory—it’s my experience. And Bombarded is how I show it.

Mess

I often walk past this abomination when in Notts but so kinda like it being so something indescribable. It kind of says everything about our culture today, a kind of hyper reality from post modernism.

It’s like society is a mess, a controlled chaos where detachment & disorder are the new ways, a complete illusion of a civilised society that doesn’t see itself for what it really is.

Walter Benjamin once wrote of cities as dreamscapes, fragments of memory and distraction, layered across surfaces like palimpsests. To him, this wall would be a living archive of a culture too overstimulated to slow down, yet always reaching for something meaningful beneath the clutter.

Carl Jung might see this as a projection of the collective unconscious, the graffiti and posters as symbolic eruptions of our shadow: all that society represses, all that longs to be seen and integrated. A kind of urban therapy, raw and unresolved.

In this image, I see both: a dream fractured by reality, and a shadow made visible by neglect.

My conclusion is that this entire blog post itself wont even probably be read lol I think my observations of this society today are that which makes people feel uncomfortable and thats what art should do I guess, I reflect on that which I see and experience.