Phone Box Blog

“Amazing revelations’: the artist who asks passersby to bare all into an old-school telephone”

From The Guardian 28 May 2024

Joe Bloom has always admired the art of the phone conversation. “You see it in movies: it’s always this nostalgic and almost glamorous thing, holding a phone up to your ear and talking into this object,” he says. (Ironically, we’re talking over Zoom.) But many of us have cut phone calls out of our lives, losing touch with their otherworldly magic. While we’re perfectly content staring at screens and scrolling through endless content, speaking into the ether has become unnervingly unnatural. And even when we do take a call, it’s usually through earphones on the move rather than by actually sitting down and putting a phone to our ear.

For Bloom, this telephobia is part of a wider trend relating to our increasingly poor connections with each other. “There are a lot of barriers now stopping us from talking in certain ways to each other,” he says. As a young person, Bloom himself struggled with face-to-face interactions. “Growing up I found eye contact really difficult, and it made me struggle talking to someone.”

Now, though, Bloom talks and listens for the sake of art. His Instagram series A View from a Bridge invites strangers walking over London’s bridges to share their thoughts on life through an old-school red telephone, and pairs each recording with an introspective, carefully chosen piece of music. The project has been a hit; just three months since he posted the first video – which featured a man called Jason talking about the dangers of being overly patriotic – the page has amassed 232,000 followers.

In many ways, this social experiment seems to be in stark contrast to what Bloom is known for best: epic psychedelic oil paintings with vast colour palettes and vivid depictions of magical realist scenes, which have been showcased at the likes of Guts Gallery and Kristin Hjellegjerde Gallery in London. But he’s also a film-maker who has directed short dramas and documentaries. “I’ve always loved the projects that bridge a gap between film and art. I’m basically interested in storytelling,” he says.

For the full article please go to The Guardian – https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/article/2024/may/28/joe-bloom-view-from-a-bridge-old-school-telephone-instagram