Signal Loss

There's a man in profile, caught mid-glance at his phone — and where his face should be, the image simply gives up. A dense knot of pixelated, wave-like static swallows his features whole, as if the act of looking down at a screen had physically unmade him. Only an ear, a jawline, dark combed-back hair survive the erasure.

The setting refuses to help him: bare concrete pillars, a barred window, diffused light falling in long, indifferent shadows. Everything is rendered in coarse black-and-white grain, closer to a forgotten contact sheet than a digital file — an analog language used to describe a very digital kind of disappearance.

It's a quiet image about a loud phenomenon: attention fed into a device until the person holding it becomes unreadable, even to us. Not horror, exactly — more like a diagnosis.