We’re living in the graveyard shift of tangible connection, and the corpses are piling up in alleys, on street corners, bolted to walls in diners that haven’t updated their décor since Carter was president. I’m talking about telephones. Real telephones. The kind with weight, with substance, with that particular species of loneliness that only inanimate objects waiting to be touched can possess.
You walk past them every day and you don’t see them anymore. That’s the first death, the death of relevance. The second death comes later, when they’re finally ripped out, trashed, disappeared into the same oblivion as cassette tapes or CDs and the idea that anyone might actually answer when you call. But between those two deaths, there’s this weird purgatory where these machines just hang there, increasingly absurd, increasingly poignant, like aging boxers who don’t know when to quit.
I’ve been photographing them. Because apparently I’ve reached that age where documenting obsolescence feels less like nostalgia and more like bearing witness to something that actually matters, even if I can’t quite articulate why.
Or maybe especially because I can’t articulate why.
The photography part isn’t some precious art project. I’m not Ansel Adams framing phone booths against mountain vistas. I’m shooting with whatever’s in my pocket, usually at odd hours, usually when I’m slightly drunk on the specific melancholy that comes from realizing you’re documenting your own irrelevance as much as the phones’. Because here’s the uncomfortable truth: I remember when these things mattered. I remember the weight of a receiver, the cold kiss of the mouthpiece, the weird intimacy of pressing something against your face that a thousand strangers had pressed against theirs.
That rotary phone at the taco stand on Vermont, the one with the yellowed plastic and the cord so tangled it looks like it’s trying to strangle itself, that phone had probably facilitated more human drama than most therapists. Breakups, makeups, emergency calls, drunk dials, awkward pauses filled with actual silence instead of the digital void we call silence now. Someone used that phone to call their mother. Someone used it to lie to their spouse. Someone used it to order carnitas on the worst night of their life, or the best, and the phone didn’t judge, didn’t track, didn’t archive for future algorithmic analysis.
I’m not romanticizing. These phones weren’t better. They were limiting, frustrating, often disgusting. But they were real in a way our current technology has engineered out of existence. They had presence. They made demands. You couldn’t ignore a ringing phone the way you ignore notifications. It was RINGING. Someone was WAITING. The urgency was built into the machine.
What I’m doing with these photographs, and I hesitate to call it documentation because that sounds too official, too planned, is creating a catalog of ghosts. Evidence that we used to reach each other differently. That connection once required more effort and somehow, paradoxically, felt less effortful. You picked up, you talked, you hung up. Done. No read receipts, no typing indicators, no performative delay to seem less desperate.
These phones are disappearing not with a bang but with bureaucratic efficiency. Telco decommissions a line, property owner realizes no one’s used it in years, out it goes. And that’s it. No ceremony, no acknowledgment. Just gone. Demolished like the Ambassador Hotel, replaced like every landmark a city or community decides isn’t photogenic enough for the brand. Which is why the photos matter, I think. They’re receipts. Proof of existence. Markers in the archaeology of how we used to be human together.
Because that’s what this is, ultimately. Archaeology. Future people will look at these images the way I look at switchboards and telegraph keys. They’ll struggle to understand the physicality of it all, the commitment required just to have a conversation. And maybe they’ll feel what I feel now: this strange mixture of relief and loss, progress and diminishment, the sense that we gained everything and lost something we can’t quite name but can still, if we’re paying attention, see hanging on walls and standing in corners, waiting for calls that will never come.
Seemed to me a phone was an impersonal instrument. If it felt like it, it let your personality go through its wires. If it didn’t want to, it just drained your personality away until what slipped through at the other end was some cold fish of a voice, all steel, copper, plastic, no warmth, no reality. It’s easy to say the wrong thing on telephones; the telephone changes your meaning on you. First thing you know, you’ve made an enemy. Then, of course, the telephone’s such a convenient thing; it just sits there and demands you call someone who doesn’t want to be called. Friends were always calling, calling, calling me. Hell, I hadn’t any time of my own.
Twice 22: The Golden Apples of the Sun / A Medicine for Melancholy