Matthew Pillsbury’s “Screen Lives”
Matthew Pillsbury was born in Neuilly-sur-Seine, France. As a teenager, Pillsbury was able to experience the rich cultural influence of European art and architecture, but was not permitted to watch television. This changed when Pillsbury began attending university in the United States.
In a conversation with the Calgary Herald’s Nancy Tousley in 2008, Pillsbury said of his time at Yale that being unable to watch television as a child led to binge-watching in college, particularly the show Melrose Place, and its role as a social activity, something that he and his friends watched together. “What’s surprising to me,” he said, “is that with the amount of time we spend in front of TVs and cellphones and BlackBerrys, it’s not an imagery that’s reflected in the art around us.”
Hiroshi Sugimoto’s Theatre series — comprised of long-exposures of movie screens in both cinemas and drive-ins — directly inspired Pillsbury’s series Screen Lives. Pillsbury’s photographs depict the photographer’s family and friends lit only with the available light from various digital devices — most prominently, televisions or laptops showing various television shows.
Pillsbury had already begun significant work on this series when, in 2004, he met Nathan Noland; this was the earliest Screen Lives image that Pillsbury made of him. Through his interactions with Noland, beginning with this image, Pillsbury began questioning his sexuality, and would later that year come out as a gay man, ending his marriage to a woman. Where the series had once been about the ways technology had begun to alter the lives of those close to the photographer, the subject matter turned inward.
The year 2004 was also a time of upheaval and visibility for gay couples, with Massachusetts becoming the first U.S. State to recognize and perform same-sex marriages. In a 2014 interview with Slate, Pillsbury said, “There’s an obvious societal respect and power that is given to your married spouse that was certainly unimaginable for gay couples [in 2004] … I think besides assuaging my own desire to photograph [Nate], making these pictures was a way of establishing his role in my life. I wanted to make it permanent and assert to myself, if no one else, that this mattered and that I was no longer ashamed.”
This image not only fulfills Pillsbury’s initial intent of highlighting the ubiquity of technology, and more particularly, screens, in the lives of those he loves, but also highlights the connections and disconnections that are sometimes made as a result of these technologies. Though Noland and Pillsbury are no longer together, Noland continues to be an important collaborator and appears in Pillsbury’s photographs.
