Apple City After Hours

I’ve got an iPhone in my hand. I’m not thinking about who built it. I’m texting someone, scrolling through something, taking a picture of myself. The people who assembled this thing are somewhere in Zhengzhou in a place called Apple City, and they’re not in my head. Maybe I’ve heard about suicides and packed dormitories once or twice, but those are the kinds of things you hear and then move past. The newer model is faster anyway.

French photographer Gilles Sabriés actually went there. He embedded himself in the Foxconn complex—the one people call Apple City—where thousands of young workers manufacture the devices we carry like they’re part of our body. What he documented in After Hours Life At Apple City is the world that exists when the work stops.

What he captured: people. They fall in love despite the gender segregation enforced on site. They go to a nightclub built specifically for them, hidden from the world. They sit together eating on construction sites and filthy streets. These aren’t statistics or abstractions—they’re actual humans living in a place most of us will never see and actively try not to think about.

What’s strange is how visible Sabriés made them, and how invisible they still are. The evidence is right there. You look at it, you feel something, and then you don’t. You go back to texting. The phone is still the phone. I’m still holding it.