10 Images With: Claire Thomas, Los Angeles

There are times when, deep into a scroll through my phone, I tilt my head and realize that I’m not even sure what app I’m on. A video takes up my entire screen. If I slide my finger down, another appears. The feeling is disorienting, so I search for small design cues at the margins of my screen. The thing I’m staring at could be TikTok, or it could be one of any number of other social apps that look exactly like it.

The peculiar stillness of mid-January settles like frost on windowpanes. After December’s warmth and sparkle have faded, we find ourselves in winter proper—that hushed interval when branches trace stark patterns against pearl-grey skies and afternoon light takes on a silvery quality.

THIS INSTALMENT of 10 IMAGES features @marcovalmarana‘s life in Japan. These images evoke an internet long gone, when you could wander onto someone’s Instagram page and get lost in their world.

Before social networks became the de-facto place for logging mundane moments from our lives, Apple’s iPhone and iPod Touch incorporated a feature that let users send footage they’d filmed directly to YouTube. The uploads were all assigned the same generic file names—IMG_0000, IMG_0001, IMG_0002, etc. The straight-to-YouTube button existed for only a few years, beginning in 2009, but that stretch of time coincided with the popularization of both iPhones and user-generated multimedia online, prompting an explosion of self-documentation.