LOOKING AT SOCIAL MEDIA AND STATES OF ALIENATION THROUGH THE PHOTOS OF ERIC PICKERSGILL AND MARTIN PARR

Smart devices, which increase the dominance of people in their daily lives, are becoming a part of life with the proliferation of social media platforms. The normalization of human images, which are isolated from the time and place they are in and focus only on the screen in front of them, in public transportation vehicles, stops and visits to relatives, summarizes this situation. Eric Pickersgill strikingly reflects these states in his photographic project Removed. The images that Pickersgill produced by blurring smart devices from their framing arouse curiosity as to whether similar situations were experienced before smart devices were invented. The main aim of the study is to examine the situations of isolation, which are frequently encountered in the social media age, in the context of alienation through Eric Pickersgill's photographs and to compare this project with Martin Parr's photographic project called Bored Couples and to question whether alienation has been experienced before the invention of smart devices. Photo projects selected with purposeful sampling were analyzed by document analysis method and compared in the context of Marx's social approach to alienation. As a result of some remarkable similarities between the photographs, important clues have been reached that the states of isolation before and during the social media age can be associated with the alienation of the individual from himself and his environment.