From my photo series: Who Still Uses Payphones? (Read more below.)

The woman in this photo is at a payphone I sometimes use to record musicians playing in the New York City subway system. I love the raspy, weird, monochrome sound of live music stuffed through a landline telephone.

One of the better of these Times Square recordings in terms of sound quality is this Brass Band (the first 10 seconds are silent for authenticity’s sake).

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No music was playing when I spotted the woman in the above photo. At about 8am on a weekday my girlfriend and I were heading back from a rough stay at a nearby hotel.  We found ourselves essentially evacuated from a certain “microtel” on 10th Avenue after the ceiling started pouring water and the room began to flood. It was a messy situation. Somehow the sight of this interesting looking human making an early morning payphone call complemented our feelings of having been jettisoned from an erstwhile placid stay at a midtown hotel.