I was rummaging through some old bookmarks when this one summoned memory of a strange experience with kismet and random connections. I am defining “kismet” as a seemingly impossible confluence of circumstances that bring connections together at random. The photo below was taken by Amanda Rivkin in March, 2016. it shows a three-paneled art piece hanging on a wall at the Chicago Avenue blue line station in Chicago, Illinois. The moment I saw it I recognized that all three of the photos were lifted from my website, and the woman on the left is a friend of mine who had sent me the photo years earlier. An artist had scraped the photos from this website and appropriated them into their work without any request. They also, for some reason, took the time to blur out the faces of the people in the first and third photos.

Here are links to the photos as they appeared on my website then, as they do now. Here is the one from Latin America (it’s Peru, to be exact). Here is the one from Poland. And here is the phone said to be from “Scandanavia” (sic). That last one is actually in Alaska. It was part of the World Ice Art Championships in Fairbanks. Never let it be said that artists who steal their material have much regard for getting their facts straight.

What happened was this. I contacted my friend Silas Huff, conductor of the Astoria Symphony Orchestra, about a matter that had nothing to do with payphones (imagine that!). I sent an email and went about my day, once in a while checking Hootsuite for interesting appearances of payphones on social media. An hour or so after sending that email to Silas I saw that the photo above had posted to Instagram a couple of weeks earlier. The woman on the left is Taylor Morris, an author of books for young people. Taylor is a friend of mine. She is also Silas Huff’s wife. I followed up with Silas, saying that I had no idea this was coming when I sent the email earlier, but that his wife was famous once again for the photo of her standing in a phone booth on an artificial floating island in Lake Titicaca, Peru. I’ll get back to why I said she was famous “once again” in a bit.

Some other emails went around, one from me asking Amanda Rivkin if she knew exactly where she took that photo. When she responded I contacted another Chicagoan friend who said he’d go past this stop the next day to look for signage identifying the artist responsible for this piece. Then an email from Silas arrived informing me that Amanda Rivkin was once the official photographer for him at an Astoria Symphony Orchestra concert 8 years earlier. He recognized the name on Instagram and all agreed, as per Amanda’s comment on her Instagram page, that this was “one for the ages.” Amanda would not have recognized Taylor in this photo, so she had no idea it had any connection to Silas.

My friend in Chicago went through the Chicago Avenue station the next day. This piece was gone. It had evidently been there for at least two years so its timely disappearance, which could not possibly have had anything to do with me spotting it on Instagram, was as random as everything about its existence. I never figured out who created it, but I don’t know what difference it would have made had I done so. None of the photos were actually mine, and they were given to me to use on this site with no restrictions whatsoever. It was not like when some random band stole one of my photos without so much as an acknowledgement, or any of the countless similar incidents that have occurred over the years.

I had said that Taylor was famous “again” for that photo because years earlier the photo appeared on buzz.yahoo.com, a now-defunct Yahoo! product which published a daily feature called “Yahoo! Pick Of The Day”. That feature once linked to this website. The photo of Taylor in the floating Peruvian phone booth accompanied that story, much to her delight. I don’t remember when that Yahoo! link posted, and no way am I going to wade through archive.org’s 17,577 captures of that site just to find out. But that Yahoo! Buzz feature brought in more pageviews and visits than any other media mention of this website, dwarfing whatever traffic I got from the New York Times piece in 2004 and all future mainstream media references. I mention this to support why I said Taylor was famous “again”. Who knows, maybe that photo will be scooped up yet again.