I had walked back to photograph a dilapidated, colonial mansion glimpsed from the car on the way to our hotel in Pondicherry. A photo of fading grandeur: ochre walls, green-shuttered windows, a collapsing tiled roof. On the roadside, a yellow tuk-tuk was parked next to a royal blue, wheeled cart propped up on bricks. Looking at the photo back at the hotel, I notice a handsome man, long-haired, barefoot. Dressed in an immaculate white kurta and trousers, he had walked into my field of vision when I was taking the photo. I had photographed not what I had seen, but what my smartphone camera had seen. In time, however, the photo will become my memory.

In the pre-digital age when I first travelled overseas, most tourists took a few photos to serve as personal souvenirs. Photos were private artefacts. They were not as now exhibits for public dissemination and approval (none more so than the selfie, in which the tourist site is exotic wallpaper for the real subject: the self). All those years ago, we derided Japanese tourists’ addiction to taking photographs of absolutely everything. Now, everyone has become a Japanese tourist. Taking a photo has become a reflex action. Our phone cameras feed our omnivorous gaze, our insatiable appetite for images. We inhabit the world through our smartphones, their screens filtering and mediating our experiences. Extensions of the body, our phones are our eyes on the world.