Flip Phone

Until I visited New York, where the images for this photo were taken. We were out shooting in Central Park on a horribly cold and windy day in February and, for some reason I don’t remember, pulled out my phone. The model giggled. I thought she was laughing at my geekiness. She then explained that, at the time, flip phones were a favorite of local pimps and drug dealers. While there were probably hundreds of thousands of people running around Manhattan with similar phones, the stereotype was prevalent enough that pulling one out while standing on a street corner was likely to get the unwanted attention of NYPD.

I was careful about where and how I used my phone after that conversation. Placing it in these photos, with the same model, was our inside joke. Nothing said pimp quite like a flip phone on a woman’s naked chest. We convinced ourselves that it was the duty of art to make fun of such social idiosyncracies and that even if we were the only ones who understood the meaning behind what we were doing that the message was still valid. One thinks such things in New York when the snow is falling. Realities of the world are somehow altered and art was as good a justification as any for being naked and playing with phones.