I grew up at the pivotal time of technological change. Landlines were replaced with cell phones, email replaced letters, inexpensive laptops replaced computer labs, and social media has since replaced everything else. Having lived with and without an online world I began to question the nebulous boundaries between these modalities and consider the points of intersection and overlap.

Our media saturated world shapes how we see and project ourselves. I have felt the physical pain of staring into a screen, acknowledged the haunting specter of surveillance, and felt the fear and anxiety for a world I cannot see, hear, or touch. Simultaneously I have found respite in curated programs and felt comforting closeness of distant loved ones through computer generated light beams. Guy Debord wrote, “Everything that was directly lived has receded into a representation.” That the representation is in turn being directly lived. Online programs track and store our behavior and we become code and algorithms. Do we have a human future or have we become commodities as we project and consume our own images? Is our future already automated and curated for us? Do we have a choice in the formation we seek or do we live in our own echo chambers?

It is from this uncertain place that I create work. I use my body as source imagery through lens based devices creating an intimate performance between human and the machine. Digital photographs, captured through low-tech devices, create intimate moments where technology and humanity converge. Vivid color and fragmented images both draw the viewer in and obscure information. They evoke emotions of connection, isolation, closeness, and vulnerability, prompting us to question which of our versions of self are complete.

I was impressed with the depth and breadth of the submissions for the 2024 Me&Eve Award and honored to be, in many cases, the first one to review newly minted work. Many series were born during and as a result of issues surrounding the pandemic years, and just now (“post pandemic”?) are gaining strength: to those brave enough to attempt to put those emotions into visual language, I thank you.

The winning submission by Anna Reed offers a strong visual representation of our current engagement with technology (hello cameras everywhere) and its impact on our humanity (perpetual lenses defining the self and society) in the series Merging Dimensions. Big topics made intimate, knowable, in a visceral sense, with an intriguing range of formats (goodbye standard photo sizes), and a healthy embrace of the digital ‘glitch.’ This work is as figurative and as abstract as the human condition. And waves its tech freak flag proudly.

– Eve Schillo • Associate Curator, Wallis Annenberg Photography Department, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, LACMA

Digital prints on paper, vinyl, and wood.