Shrinking World Series

Shrinking World Series by KT Nichols

To some, this may seem like a collaboration of portraits. To me, this is the world.

Some refer to the human web of social networking as the Six Degress of Separation, which is the idea that if a person is one step away from each person they know, then they are two steps away from each person known by one of the people they know, etc. This idea was popularized in a play by John Guare, but has been revisited in songs, movies, books and even the game of Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon. After researching social networking, I discovered the studies done entitled the “Shrinking World” in 1929 by Frigyes Karinthy. He believed that the modern world was 'shrinking' due to this ever-increasing connectedness of human beings. He posited that despite great physical distances between the globe's individuals, the growing density of human networks made the actual social distance far smaller.

In creating this series, I set up the studio the same every time I had a model coming in, but once they were there, I decided to change the lights, turn them and move everything. I kept consistency with the dark background, using a hair light to show the outline of the figure. I enjoyed the emotion that shown through in the faces of the people without a smile. I would instruct the models to just “Look at me, and I’ll tell you when I’ll photograph you,” however, most of the time I would just snap a few photos of them just staring into the lens. I chose these unstaged facial expressions to express the truth behind their faces, not what the world may want to see or what they felt they needed to show.


The “Shrinking World” is exactly the way this series of photographs came together. Just moving back to the DC area after being away for 6 years, I was able to find subjects for my series through emails, phone calls, and text messages, I connected with lots of subjects. Some of the subjects I just met that day, some have known me my entire life and some I have known their entire life. Due to technological advances in communications and travel, friendship networks could grow larger and span greater distances, just as Karinthy hypothesized in 1929. Washington DC is a melting pot of different types of people: age ranges, nationalities, job titles, personalities and race, however we all communicate and all share the same common structure regardless of our social “labels”. This is why I chose to keep constants throughout the photographs to symbolize the connectedness; changing other factors because no two people are the same. I wanted to express connectedness and difference within my series.

This is my series. This is America. This is my world.