Looking Into Matthew Johnson's Screen Time Series
In a dimly lit room, a television screen glows, throwing off flickers of light from a live broadcast. Millions of pixels shift back and forth, showing flashes of events, from the graceful motion of an athlete at a global sports competition to plumes of smoke rising from a geopolitical conflict on the other side of the world. Most people take in these flashes as a stream of information that just passes through, one piece of news replacing another before it's ever fully absorbed. Photographer Matthew Johnson chooses to stop right at the second that usually slips by unnoticed.
Through his photo series titled Screen Time, Johnson points his analog and digital cameras straight at the surface of monitor and television screens, using long exposure to freeze moments from live broadcasts into atmospheric visual works.
Technically speaking, Screen Time runs on a visual paradox. Televisions and monitor screens throw off moving images at a fast refresh rate, built to simulate real motion as if our eyes were witnessing the event directly, with nothing standing in between. When Johnson applies long exposure to a broadcast already in motion, his camera's shutter duration captures the passage of time carried by whatever is moving on screen, forcing something built for speed to end up recorded in a slowed, dissolving state instead.
What comes out of it is far from a stiff digital screenshot. The sweep of light from the moving image creates a soft blur, closer to a watercolor painting or an abstract expressionist aesthetic. The scan lines of the screen, its pixel grid, and the refraction of the monitor's light merge with whatever is being broadcast, producing a distinct visual artifact. Johnson also states plainly that every piece in the series comes from pure photographic experimentation, with no AI generation involved.
"This experiment is my way of enjoying the practice of art. I'm not trying to trick anyone. I'm trying to capture how we experience an event through the mediation of a screen," says Matthew Johnson.
The project hasn't escaped heated debate within the visual art and photography community. Some critics and online commenters question the legitimacy of the work, with a simple argument. Isn't this just photographing someone else's TV. But looked at through the lens of visual art history, Johnson's approach actually runs parallel to the virtual photography practice associated with Harry Gruyaert, while also carrying forward the long tradition of Appropriation Art pioneered by artists like Richard Prince and Andy Warhol.
The strength of Screen Time doesn't sit in the object being photographed. What drives the work is how the act of observation itself gets transformed. From his own living space, Johnson demonstrates a kind of resourcefulness in which a domestic room can turn into a studio for observing the visual world at large.
There are a few reasons this approach lands as powerfully as it does. The first has to do with compressing emotion and tragedy. When photographing news coverage of conflict, things like wartime tension, missiles lighting up a night sky, or displaced populations, Johnson's long shutter melts military-grade technical detail into a haunting wash of light. That blur, rather than softening the impact, doubles its emotional weight. The tragedy feels distant and painfully close at once, mirroring exactly how modern audiences experience the world's disasters, watching from behind the glass of a smartphone or television screen.
The second reason ties into a critique of mass media consumption. In everyday life, we're exposed to doomscrolling and a flood of images that dulls our sensitivity, one tragic picture followed by another until everything starts to feel flat and interchangeable. By freezing a live broadcast into a single, poetic, static frame, Screen Time forces the viewer to pause, to look at visual detail that usually vanishes within a second, and to reconsider our relationship with a screen we've long treated as a neutral window onto the world.
The third reason concerns a kind of humanist authenticity in the age of AI. In a moment when digital platforms are saturated with synthetic, flawlessly smooth AI generated imagery, Johnson's analog, hands on experimentation with a television screen offers a different kind of visual freshness. The work proves that experimenting within the limits of a technical medium, something as ordinary as a camera pointed at a living room TV, can still produce authenticity that genuinely lands, without leaning on any generative algorithm at all.
The process itself can be described as a simple sequence. Starting from a television broadcast or digital screen, Johnson intervenes with his camera through long exposure, until the moving image turns into a blurred, pictorial abstraction. At its core, Matthew Johnson's photography becomes a kind of documentation of a reality already mediated by a screen, rather than the reality itself.
