David Newson-Tran, Before Strangers (ART 2026)

We live in a moment of unprecedented connection. More contact, more proximity, more channels between us than any previous generation has had access to. And yet something has inverted. The closer the network draws us, the more each person appears to retreat into a private elsewhere. This is what the images hold. Figures standing beside each other without meeting. Faces lit not by the room but by what they are carrying. The photographs do not mourn this. They observe it, the way the meaning of shared space has changed, and how naturally, without drama, we have come to accept that arrangement. "The spectacle reunites the separate, but reunites it as separate."

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