Wish You Were Here is a portrait of distraction in one of the most emotionally saturated rooms on earth. Made inside the National Gallery, the series photographs visitors absorbed in their phones, faces lit by screens while masterpieces hang within arm’s reach.

It began as an attempt to capture a feeling I recognised in myself: the impulse to record a moment rather than fully inhabit it.

The National Gallery holds a concentrated archive of humanity: love, joy, grief, power, tenderness, violence, all painted with an intensity that has survived centuries.

And yet, again and again, that depth is bypassed for the frictionless pull of the feed: mindless reels, notifications, the reflex to look down. The work isn’t a moral lecture. It’s a document of a collective habit, and a quiet question about what we trade when attention becomes optional.

These photographs sit in the tension between presence and performance. They ask what happens when the urge to “capture” replaces the act of seeing, when the most profound images we could encounter become background noise.

How many moments that might have altered a life have been missed, not through malice, but through drift? Wish You Were Here is both witness and warning: a record of how easily we leave the room, even while standing inside it.