Who Can It Be Now?

He stood apart, not physically—just mentally. Everyone else was turned toward the stage, pulsing with light and sound, faces lifted, absorbed. But he was here, high above the crowd on a metal platform, lit by a cold phone screen. Not watching, not present. Swiping, scrolling, messaging—connected to everything but the moment directly in front of him.

I composed this with intent. The platform rails frame him almost like a cage. He isn’t trapped, but the symbolism’s hard to ignore. The crowd beyond is dense, soft-focused, awash in ambient green and blue from the stage lights. Exposure had to be pushed—concert lighting isn’t kind to dynamic range—but I kept it tight enough to hold detail in his shirt, the rails, and the nearby figures. ISO was high, noise crept in, but the grit adds to the digital haze that surrounds the subject.

The contrast here isn’t just tonal—it’s behavioural. We’re at a concert. A collective event. And yet, the focal point is someone looking down at a screen, isolated on a perch, lost in a separate feed.

This isn’t a judgement. It’s a document. A single frame that reflects a new kind of dissonance: physically present, mentally elsewhere.