The Eye in the Hand

We all have a camera in our pocket. We use it dozens of times a day, without thinking, for countless purposes. It has become so much a part of us that we no longer even see it. And it is precisely because it has become invisible that it is interesting for mediation. Taking the most ordinary object there is and doing something completely out of the ordinary with it: that is the very principle of what I propose. Like picking up a pen, the most commonplace of objects, and writing a poem.

The invisible tool

There is an expression I often use: the eye in the hand. It refers to the fact that we film, photograph and frame the world with our phones without even looking at what we are doing, as if our body had acquired a new mechanical eye. The device is in the hand, the eye is in the hand, and the gesture has become so natural that there is no longer any distance between us and the machine. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, in Phenomenology of Perception (1945), described how a blind person using a cane no longer feels the cane in their hand: they feel the ground at the tip of the cane. A technical object, when it is truly incorporated, ceases to be perceived as an object. It becomes an extension of our perception.

This is exactly what has happened with the phone. We no longer perceive it as an object we use. We perceive the world through it. We see with it, we communicate with it, we remember with it. It has become what anthropologists of technology call a body-object: an artefact so deeply integrated into our bodily existence that it redefines its boundaries. And therein lies both the trap and the opportunity.

The trap is transparency. Because the tool is invisible, because it is part of everyday life, we get the impression that nothing is at stake. Taking a photo with your phone — everyone does it, it’s nothing, it’s normal. This apparent banality masks what is really going on when we make images with machines. Every photo is a mechanical recording, a piece of evidence, an act that fixes something of reality and makes it potentially public. It is never trivial, even when it looks that way.

The opportunity is familiarity. Because everyone has technical mastery of this tool, because no one needs to be told how to take a photo with their phone, the technical barrier is abolished. There is no bottleneck of learning an instrument, as in music, or mastering software, as in video editing. The person can focus immediately on what matters: not how to do it, but why to do it, and what it does to them.

The frame changes everything

This is where mediation comes in. Not as technical instruction, since the technique is already there, but as a proposed frame. And it is the frame we set that changes everything.

Let us take a concrete example. You are in the street, you see a beautiful ray of sunlight, you take out your phone, you snap a photo, you send it to someone you love. This act is everyday, spontaneous, fluid. It belongs to what I call image-orality: a gesture of immediate, ephemeral, unpremeditated communication.

Now imagine I say to you: “You have fifteen minutes. Take a photo on the theme of art as a tool for encountering yourself. There must be a hand in the image. One single photo, the one you will choose from several. Then we will look at it together, projected large, and the others will say what they see in it. You will not be allowed to speak.”

The tool is the same. The gesture is the same. Fingers on the screen, framing in the viewfinder, the shutter release, and finally the sharing. But the experience is radically different. Because there is an intention, a theme, a formal constraint, a set timeframe, and above all a frame of reception that will give this image an entirely different status from a message sent to a loved one. The image will be instituted. It will be projected large. It will bear the person’s first name, symbolising their psychic construction. It will be seen, read, interpreted by others. It will shift from the register of everyday communication to the register of shared creation.

Erving Goffman, in Frame Analysis (1974), showed that we never perceive the world in a raw state but always through frames that organise our experience and determine what is relevant in a given situation. The same physical behaviour can mean entirely different things depending on the frame in which it occurs. Raising your arm in the street means hailing a taxi. Raising your arm in a courtroom means taking an oath. Raising your arm in a dance class is a choreographic movement. The gesture is identical; the frame changes everything.

Similarly, taking a photo with your phone on the metro and taking a photo with your phone in an art workshop involve the same technical gesture, but the experience is entirely different. The frame of mediation transforms an ordinary gesture into an act of creation. And it is this transformation that constitutes, strictly speaking, the mediator’s work: not teaching a new gesture, but creating the frame that gives a familiar gesture a new reach.

The false obviousness of a familiar tool

There is a paradox to confront. Because the tool is familiar, participants often assume the exercise will be easy. It’s my phone, I know how to take photos, I’ll be fine. But then the instruction arrives, the theme is set, the constraint of the hand is stated, and something shifts. This is nothing like taking a photo in the everyday flow. There is an intention, a frame, something at stake. And suddenly the familiar tool becomes strange. You no longer know what to photograph. You hesitate. You doubt. You go out, you walk, you search.

This is exactly what happens in a writing workshop when participants are asked to write a poem with the pen they use every day for shopping lists. The pen is the same. But the act is nothing alike. And it is in this gap between the familiarity of the tool and the strangeness of its use that a space of discovery opens up. The person confronts themselves through an object they thought they had mastered. They discover that technical mastery guarantees nothing when it comes to self-expression. That the hardest part is not knowing how to take a photo, but finding what you have to say — or simply daring to “do whatever”, to create a photo from intuition. Because what we have to say, often, we do not know until we have said it. It is in the doing that we discover ourselves to ourselves.

This phenomenon brings to mind what the English psychoanalyst Marion Milner described in On Not Being Able to Paint (1950). Milner, who was not a painter, took up painting to explore what happens in the creative act. And she discovered that the main obstacle was not technical. It was the conflict between what she wanted to do and what came when she let go of control. A familiar tool, the moment it is asked to serve a creative intention, reveals the tension between mastery and letting go. And it is within this tension that the therapeutic space resides.

The tool with no function

Let us return for a moment to the object itself, because its historical singularity sheds light on what is possible today in mediation. Before 2007, before the iPhone, each phone had a determined function. There was the phone for emails, the phone for music, the phone with the camera, and the phone just for making calls. The object was tied to its use. This was the classic industrial approach: you build a tool for a function.

What Steve Jobs invented, and what seems so obvious today that we struggle to grasp its significance, is an object with no predetermined function. A pocket computer whose capabilities depend on the software installed on it. The object is an open platform. It does not prescribe its use. It makes use possible.

For mediation, this openness is decisive. A traditional camera can only take photos. A camcorder can only make films. A tape recorder can only record sound. The phone can do all of that, and also share creations instantly, project them, discuss them, transform them, archive them. The entire chain of creation, from making to sharing to receiving, fits within a single object that every person carries with them.

This means that mediation is no longer dependent on equipment that would need to be provided, set up, and explained. It can begin immediately, with what people have in their pockets. This is a radical democratisation of access to image-making. And it is also a reversal of the mediator’s posture: I am no longer the one who brings the tool and knows how it works. I am the one who proposes a frame for a different use of a tool that everyone already owns.

Détournement as method

There is a word for what we do when we propose a creative use of an everyday object: détournement. The word comes from the Situationists — Guy Debord and his companions — who in the 1960s theorised détournement as a creative and subversive repurposing of the objects of consumer society. Taking a product, a sign, an object of the system and turning it against its intended use to make something unexpected.

Without going as far as the political charge of Situationism, there is something of this order in image-based mediation. The phone is a consumer object, designed to be regularly replaced, and for us to consume content, produce data, and feed platforms. To détourner it is to use it against the grain. It means saying: with this object that is designed to capture our attention, to scroll, to like, to post, we are going to do something else. We are going to create. We are going to stop. We are going to look. We are going to take our time.

This détournement is not hostile to the object. It is not about condemning it, rejecting it, or saying that phones are bad. It is about showing, through experience, that another use is possible. That the same object which scatters us can also bring us together. That the same object which isolates us behind our individual screens can also create something shared when we project the images large and look at them together. That the same object which keeps us in the flow can also help us stop, if someone creates the conditions for that pause to happen.

This is why mediation is not a lesson and still less a warning. It is a lived experience which, without moralising, opens a space where people discover for themselves that they can do something else with their tools than what they usually do with them. And this discovery, because it passes through the body, through the gesture, through emotion, takes root infinitely more deeply than a lecture on digital practices.

What happens when we step out of ordinary use

I would like to end with what actually happens when people accept this détournement. When they go out, phone in hand, with an instruction that pulls them out of their habitual use.

First there is a moment of drifting. The phone in the hand, this gesture they make a thousand times a day, no longer has the same meaning. They do not know what to photograph. They no longer look at the world in the same way. What was transparent — the world around them — becomes opaque again, intriguing, full of possibilities. It is as if the instruction had disrupted their automatic vision and switched it back to manual mode.

Then there is a moment of encounter. A detail, a light, a shape — something that catches the eye and resonates, without quite knowing why, with the proposed theme. When this moment arrives, people often describe it as a surprise. They did not plan it. They did not search for it in their head and then find it in the world. The world offered them something, and they seized it. This is the opposite of everyday use, where you know what you want to do before you do it. Here, you discover what you wanted to do by doing it. Some speak of an altered state of consciousness, or a trance — a small one, to be sure, but real.

And then there is the moment of collective reception, when the image made with the most ordinary tool in the world is projected large, on a wall, in a slightly darkened room, with the others gathered round. And suddenly, this image made in fifteen minutes with a phone in a corridor, a staircase or the street has a weight, a presence, a density that no one had anticipated. The others see things in it that its maker had not consciously put there. The group is often moved by these photos made with such an ordinary tool. And this is where something turns: it is not the tool that gives value to what is produced. It is the frame, the intention, the quality of attention brought to it.

This, ultimately, is the meaning of mediation: not bringing a new tool, but transforming how we see a familiar one — and through that, transforming how we see ourselves and the world. The eye in the hand, when offered a different frame, becomes a fresh eye.

Photographs taken by students in the University of Paris 7’s Certificate Program in Therapeutic Mediation (2025–2026).