Times Square Subway Station Payphone Customer. February, 2014.

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).

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.