I spotted this picture last week at the Museum of Modern Art.

The photo, by Helen Levitt, is called “New York, 1971.”

This gentleman’s behaviour, in which he casually smokes a cigarette whilst perhaps waiting for a call, seems to embody that of the Payphone Hog, that nuisance of earlier generations who monopolized these public resources.

For this man the phone booth was his remote office. His livelihood depended on reliable access to working public phone and a fist full of coins with which to call clients and associates. His phone booth sessions might end after a collect call to the home office, or after checking messages on a cassette-tape answering machine or paid answering service.

This booth is one of the green style phone booths which used to stand on sidewalks and public spaces around New York. This style of booth has almost completely vanished. Almost. I spotted a rare and amazing row of these old green New York City phone booths at the 79th Street Boat Basin in October, 2010. I would think that other booths of this style might still be moldering away in other spaces.

“New York, 1971” reminds me of “Glengarry Glen Ross”, specifically the opening scene of that film in which Shelley Levene (played by Jack Lemmon) and Dave Moss (played by Ed Harris) work the payphones, calling contacts and mining for sales.

Shelley Levene opens the film by shoveling coins into a New York Telephone payphone.

He dials a phone number which appears to be 273-6800, then asks an operator for extension “2306”.

A conversation with “Honey” ensues, ending when Levene hangs up with a middle finger — possibly a symbolic gesture.

Dave Moss steps into the phone booth next door, grousing throughout the scene about the “deadbeat leads” given to him by the home office. Moss interrupts his rant when a Mrs. Svoboda answers his call. She is evidently uneager to talk with Mr. Moss about the Rio Ranch Estate, but Mr. Moss promises to call back in 10 minutes.

Levene calls a Dr. Lewenstein and, when he is unable to talk to the Doctor he ends the call without leaving contact information: “I can’t be reached,” he says, using a turn of phrase for which some of us (such as myself) get nostalgic. We are so reachable today that at times we become unreachable. If someone attempting to contact us can not divine which medium to use — E-mail? Text message? Social networking site? — then the eminent reachability promised by technology starts to feel like a cruel myth.

The noir scene which opens “Glengarry Glen Ross” depicts classic payphone culture. The phone booth used to be the Remote Office, the work-from-anywhere promise of technology as once represented by the coin-hungry public telephone. Today the payphone and the phone booth are replaced by laptop computers, Internet-everywhere connectivity and (of course) cell phones, but I sometimes feel that technology’s ability to keep people connected becomes, through its ubiquity, diluted.

The Museum of Modern Art exhibit has 16 photos by Helen Levitt, which can be seen at the MoMA blog if you can’t make it to the museum. Levitt’s series on display includes a couple of other phone booth pictures, including New York, 1974:

I would like to have known Helen Levitt. In 1959 she was awarded a Guggenheim fellowship to pursue the style of photography seen in these two phone booth pictures. 10 years of her work was stolen by someone who evidently knew what they were looking for, absconding with virtually all of her work in color from the 1960s. I like to imagine that this work will be discovered some day, but when I say I would like to have known Helen Levitt it is because she did not let this professional and creative theft cripple her. Her body of work seems no less expansive for that gaping absence of a decade.