For this photo essay, Magnum Photos President Thomas Dworzak traveled to Switzerland and documented the lives of Geneva residents along with the digital “footprints” they leave behind every day. Drawing on research by the Edgelands Institute that explored Geneva’s evolving systems of everyday surveillance, Dworzak sought to use photography to tell the story of how the digitalization of our daily lives affects — and diminishes — our security.
Special series
This is the second in a series of multimedia collaborations on evolving systems of surveillance in medium-sized cities around the world by photographers atMagnum Photos, data geographers at theEdgelands Institute, an organization that explores how the digitalization of urban security is changing the urban social contract, and essayists commissioned by Coda Story.
Our first essay examined surveillance on the streets of Medellín, Colombia.
He accompanied Geneva citizens in their daily routines while documenting the digital traces of their activities throughout the day. Dworzak researched the places that store our digital data and photographed them as well — an investigation that proved difficult and revealing of the lack of transparency surrounding the handling and storage of personal data.
To conclude the project, Dworzak sent each of his subjects a postcard from places where their digital information is stored: a simple way to demonstrate the randomness of where our digitally collected information ends up.
Thomas writes:
Do citizens of Geneva understand how surveillance takes place in their daily lives? The relationship between surveillance and power can be understood as a contemporary version of the “social contract,” originally conceptualized by the Genevan philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau in his 18th century seminal work on democracies.
For this photo essay, Magnum Photos President Thomas Dworzak traveled to Switzerland and documented the lives of Geneva residents along with the digital “footprints” they leave behind every day. Drawing on research by the Edgelands Institute that explored Geneva’s evolving systems of everyday surveillance, Dworzak sought to use photography to tell the story of how the digitalization of our daily lives affects — and diminishes — our security.
Special series
This is the second in a series of multimedia collaborations on evolving systems of surveillance in medium-sized cities around the world by photographers atMagnum Photos, data geographers at theEdgelands Institute, an organization that explores how the digitalization of urban security is changing the urban social contract, and essayists commissioned by Coda Story.
Our first essay examined surveillance on the streets of Medellín, Colombia.
He accompanied Geneva citizens in their daily routines while documenting the digital traces of their activities throughout the day. Dworzak researched the places that store our digital data and photographed them as well — an investigation that proved difficult and revealing of the lack of transparency surrounding the handling and storage of personal data.
To conclude the project, Dworzak sent each of his subjects a postcard from places where their digital information is stored: a simple way to demonstrate the randomness of where our digitally collected information ends up.
Thomas writes:
Do citizens of Geneva understand how surveillance takes place in their daily lives? The relationship between surveillance and power can be understood as a contemporary version of the “social contract,” originally conceptualized by the Genevan philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau in his 18th century seminal work on democracies.
