Photographer Soumayan Biswas met 12-year-old Sabana lying beside a tangle of fishing nets near a village pond in West Bengal on a muted, cloudy afternoon, but the mask-like pose that organizes his photograph was her idea, making the child a participant in the image rather than passive evidence captured by an adult. [1]

Biswas did not know whether the eyes displayed on the phone were created, downloaded or found online, and he described his interest as the visual relationship between a child and a digital screen, not a documented account of her habits. [1]

He explicitly rejected reading the photograph as proof that Sabana was personally addicted, a boundary that removes any basis for inferring her screen time, diagnosis, motive or the behavior of children elsewhere in India from one composed scene. [1]

The picture can still invite an argument about childhood and phones, but preserving Sabana's authorship changes that argument and makes interpretation an ethical question as well as an aesthetic one: viewers are looking at a collaboration that uses a screen as metaphor, not a candid clinical record whose apparent meaning overrules its subject. [1]

No verified topical X status emerged from three recorded searches, so the addiction reading remains a tendency rather than consensus; the Guardian's account makes the consequence plain, since moral panic erases the child's agency before it mislabels the art. [1]

-- PRIYA SHARMA, Delhi