The security guard at the main entrance seemed unwilling to let me take a photo of these long-dead payphones, located just next to the security desk inside the main entrance to the Metropolitan Museum. The guard relented and let me do it, then yelled at me for using a flash.

I tried to joke with the guards about how those flash bulb photons must chip away at the patinæ of antiquities like these old payphones.

Not even a chuckle. These security guards were strictly business, and probably wished they had denied my request to photograph these suckers.

I don’t even know what “photons” are, if they exist, or if that word has any place in the discussion of why flash photography is typically banned in most museums. I just remember a college friend returning from the Art Institute of Chicago complaining that a guard there yelled at him for using a flash. He claimed the guard chided him for (his exact words) “blasting photons onto the painting.”

These old payphones at the Met Museum may not be antiquities compared to other items housed at that august institution. But like most of the artists on display at this museum the phones, numbered, 212-650-1305 and 212-650-0682, have been dead for a long time.

As you enter the museum these phones are on the left of the main entrance doors, somewhat hidden in a shadowy space. Another phone lurked on the other side of the main doors, to the left of the exits as you leave the building. That one was way behind a “No Entry” barricade and, after the scruples shown by the first guards upon entry, seemed not worth the challenge of asking to take a photo.

Other dead phones may very well lurk throughout the Museum. These were all I had time for.

Another dead  phone lurks in a building next door, at the Uris Education Center. In 2016 that payphone worked but today it is dead.