After the Shift Ends at Apple City

Nobody thinks about who made their phone. Not really. The knowledge exists in some abstract form—a factory somewhere, poor conditions, occasionally a news story about suicides—we feel appropriately uncomfortable for a day and then go back to the device and let the distance reassert itself. The distance is convenient. The distance is the point.

French photographer Gilles Sabrié decided to collapse it. He traveled to the Foxconn complex in Zhengzhou—one of the massive production facilities that many call Apple City—where thousands of young workers assemble expensive status symbols day after day in conditions few people who own those products ever stop to consider.

His photo series After Hours Life At Apple City documents what happens when the shift ends. People fall in love despite strict gender separation policies. They dance in a nightclub built specifically for factory workers. They eat on construction sites and along dirty streets. They have faces and lives and desires that continue existing outside the assembly line. Sabrié photographs all of it without editorial comment, and that restraint is exactly right—here are the people behind the screen you’re holding, living and celebrating and dreaming inside a world you’ve been carefully encouraged not to think about.