Telephone Booth Notes
Next to the Ice Machine, quite literally, stands the American aluminum telephone booth. I remember when I was a kid seeing a guy washing out and squeegeeing a telephone booth in Pacific Palisades, California. I wondered how one might obtain such a job. I pondered the telephone booth as much as the Ice Machine. The booth always looked better at night with its round fluorescent tube a-glow inviting the stranger to step in for a moment or two. The telephone booth is a marked location and point where many important moments have passed. These Electronic Apparatuses, are rooms created at the most odd places in our everyday landscape so we can privately chat with others who are far away, now seem odd and old to me.
I realized in the mid 90's as cell phone popularity was rising, and when more cell phone relay stations were being erected, that the telephone booth was going to disappear. I remember late at night, coming back from a punk show in DC, that the familiar glowing light of the telephone booth was gone from where I lived in Arlington,Virginia at the corner of Washington Blvd and Pershing Drive. The telephone booth was removed and was gone forever. I then decided to start shooting the Telephone booth in it's landscape, many times they appear next to the Ice Machine.
In 2002 when I was in Alabama, I saw phone booths and shot them and the next week they would be gone with the footprint markings on the pavement of where they were. Where did they all go? One day down in Pearisburg, Virginia, the telephone cooperative had two standing in their parking lot in disrepair. Here, I offered to purchase one. I now not only own hundreds of negative images of the telephone booth, but a real one as well!.
Below is a digital photograph of my Telephone Booth at my house in Arlington Virginia, March 29, 2009 (yes, I have the telephone, it's not installed yet).
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