The mobile phone in the twenty first century can be a curse and it can be a blessing. It can contain all the attributes that modern technology offers to the point where the original purpose of the telephone: communication – speaking and listening -becomes subsumed by a plethora of apps and functions that have no bearing on this most human of connections.

Too often we see people sitting in silence, transfixed by their device, lost in a solipsistic trance. In effect, they have disappeared. They are oblivious to their fellow citizens, their surroundings, the world.

Emma Bass has taken a different approach. She has used this remarkable tool as a third eye, a ‘portal’ as she calls it, to capture images from her day-to-day life. She looks out, through the phone, searching for those little coincidences that speak to us, that make us gasp and sigh, and here, in the pages of this book, she communicates them back to us.