Screen time: a photography special

It plays a bigger role in our lives than ever before. It’s a tool for work and learning – and a portal to virtual worlds of entertainment, intimacy and play. We explore our changing relationship to the screen

© Giovanni Fredi
How we all became screen obsessives

Phones, TV and games constantly vie for our attention — but how much do they add to our lives?

Paul Graham’s photographs reveal people transfixed by television

These pictures show how, before the smartphone, we were already in thrall to the small screen

Eve Arnold’s haunting photographs of Marilyn Monroe and ‘The Misfits’

Portraits taken on the set of the classic film capture the emotional fragility of its troubled stars

The television in the cupboard: how TV infiltrates our subconscious

‘I feasted on “Game of Thrones” over a few dense weeks. During this time I dreamed entirely inside the show’

From arcades to political avatars: the evolution of video games since the 1980s

Artists have long been drawn to gaming and its ability to unite and divide us

The agony and ecstasy of smashing your smartphone screen

At times when I’m anxious, I feel my phone like a weight. It’s a portal to infinite misreadings’

More from this Series

Jeff Mermelstein’s photos of other people’s text messages

From the mundane to the absurd, texts illuminate the range of the human condition

Hiroshi Sugimoto: how I photographed an entire movie in a single frame

What happened when the artist snuck a large-format camera into a run-down cinema

Sameer Raichur captures the elation of Kannada moviegoing in India

The release of a so-called Sandalwood film is the cue for performative celebrations

‘Dark Waters’ and how the paranoid style seeped into cinema

A set of visual conventions have entered the filmic water table itself

Amalia Ulman: why I staged my own Instagram meltdown

What a fictionalised online performance revealed about the way we view women online

Christopher Nunn: when TVs became a weapon of war in Ukraine

When Russian troops seized Crimea in 2014, the television sets in people’s homes became a crucial propaganda tool

My life as a video-game gnome mage

‘In World of Warcraft, I was projecting a version of myself that was free of adolescent burdens’