I photographed this family as it gathered in the park for a celebratory get-together. The purple and white balloons are the key to the nature of the event. Perhaps they are school colors, and represent a graduation? The kids seem to cluster around a toddler, while the man, the highest point of the picture, represents the parent in control of the evening. Yet the person that actually dominates this image is the woman who turns away from the group to attend to the demands of her cell phone. She is part of the celebration, but she is also quite far away at this moment.

It is the spare geometric context that makes this image of a person talking on a cell phone work as expression. I compose the image as a series of boxes and surfaces, enclosing the subject’s head and hand as a symptom of disembodiment. On one hand, she is reaching out to talk with someone out of the box. Yet she herself stands within a series of enclosures – a brown wall separates her from the foreground, a yellow wall surrounds the opening in which she stands, and within that wall, a doorway packages her head in a black void. This image could represent a society that steadily drifts away from face-to-face interpersonal communication, in favor of detached, disembodied cellular contact.

It is an hour before sunset, and this sunbather takes the opportunity to catch the last rays of her day at the beach. While she does so, she holds an electronic device to her ear – it glows within her fingers. Using my spot-metering mode, I expose on the bright light reflecting off her legs, making the surrounding sand darker and the rest of the image feature the interplay of light and shadow. She seems utterly relaxed, a tribute, perhaps, to what she may hear coming from that glowing receiver. Is it the voice of a person, a recorded message, or a piece of music? I leave the answers up to our own imaginations.

The flowers that separate a sidewalk café from the sidewalk itself make a tempting target for the curious hands of this youngster. The baby-sitter (probably its father), is momentarily distracted by something on the screen of his smartphone. By shooting the child from behind, and simultaneously shooting the man as he hides behind his hand and phone, I abstract both subjects and invite the viewer’s imagination to join in the fun. We see neither of their faces here. Instead we wonder how long it may take the man to discover what is going on amidst the flowers.

I make this image of a cellular conversation incongruous by the incorporating the reflection in the background. The gesture is repeated twice, as is the intense expression. A logo of a reflected truck fills the background, while a mysterious headless figure is also reflected between the truck and the woman on the phone.

A courier has just parked his motorbike on the sidewalk, and checks his phone next to an incongruous environmental advertisement. He is absorbed with his phone and does not even see the man in the ad, who wears a protective suit and drifts on a sea of indifference. The courier is intent, while the man in the ad seems helpless.

I made this four-layer image from a distance, using a long lens to compress the layers together. In the close foreground, the curving roof of a black car creates a mysterious presence, its driver invisible behind tinted windows. The Coffee Place itself appears in a second foreground layer – it is a fast food shop on wheels, bearing pictures of grilled breakfasts on its sides, with a window open to both sides. I caught a passing man talking on a cell phone within this window and made him my primary layer. He ignores the promise of a grilled breakfast to focus on other needs at the moment. The final layer is the blue peeling wall in the background, probably a wall around a construction site. Its primary color repeats the deeper blue that surrounds the advertisements on the Coffee Place.

Three key factors drew me to this image of a man taking a call on the street. I liked the way he makes himself comfortable by using a fire hydrant as a footrest. I also found the abstracted man wearing a hard hat in the background to symbolize a city always at work. Finally, there is the colorful ethnic food advertisement that expresses the flavor of the place. The image provides a splendid urban context for what is a private conversation.

An advertisement filled backdrop supplies the last of three layers that make this image function. The middle layer contrasts two people, one of them is in motion, while the other seems frozen into stillness because he is involved with a phone call. The foreground layer, featuring a subway entrance, gives the image its New York City context.