A question sometimes rears its annoying head. It is a stay-at-home question that presumes itself more sociologically prescient than even the most inscrutably arcane answer one can give it — as if the matter is profoundly ludicrous in these modern times:
Question: “Who still uses payphones?”
Answer (in the form of a visually-aided question): Do these people count?

The question — with its faint stench of technological snobbery and implicit ridicule — annoys me. It annoys me not because I imagine that payphones are central to communications in today’s world. What annoys me are biases against those who have no need for or simply don’t have the money to spend on continuous access to mobile telephone and Internet services.

Payphones (the ones that actually work) appear to be anything but silent in New York City. In the past I never paid particular attention to human beings using public telephones. Why would I? Who cares? What’s the big deal about somebody making a phone call?

But after I first noticed the “who still uses payphones?” questions on the Intertubes I started collecting pictures of people using payphones as I spotted them, waiting until I had sufficient quantity to assemble into a photo essay (“People Using Payphones”).

Payphones still get used in this year of 2012, at least in New York City. Here we see people burrowing their heads into payphone enclosures, their bodies and minds tethered to the lowly landline by pruner-proof metal cords.

After blithly pursuing this subject for a year or two I still found it hard to understand why anyone would ask the question.

Is this even interesting?

Dost I morbidly chase a failed meme?

“Who still uses payphones?”

WHO CARES?

Yet I found the pictures interesting. IIINNNNteresting.

The profile of today’s payphone user does not seem to fit a single demographic or stereotype. New Yorkers and tourists alike depend on public telephones from time to time. As these pictures show the phones are used by children, the elderly, and all age ranges in between.

Are these citizens wealthy and mentally adroit enough for inclusion in the digital revolution? I do not know but the presumed financial status and alleged ignorance of payphone users is the stereotype that annoys me the most. Not everyone has $49.99 a month to piss away on unused telephone services and needless Internet-anywhere access. And of those who do have the money not all of them want to piss away $49.99 a month on unused telephone services and needless Internet-anywhere access.

Payphone usage is down considerably since the rise of the cell phone but some human beings still hope public telephones work when needed. Wireless carriers failed, 911 access was limited to the privileged, and one was hard-pressed to find a working payphone after the September, 2011, earthquake. The Blackout of August, 2003, left most New Yorkers standing in line to use the few working payphones in this town.

Payphones are not what they used be — or are they? Sometimes I wonder if payphones ever really were what they allegedly “used to be”. Nostalgia conflates realities that did not quite exist as specified. Phone booths, often described by bitter nostalgians as quiet and safe cocoons of communication where one could converse privately in a public space were, as best I can recall, filthy columns of stink where conversations suffocated in humid putridity, continuously interrupted by nickels and dimes tapped on the phone booth’s glass.

The worst conversations I ever had in my life occurred in phone booths. I suspect the same is true for others of a certain age. Yet the more easily-digestible bitterness of nostalgia pronounces those now-fabled spaces exquisite, discarding the present and the future as garbage, crowning only the past as golden.

Cell phones did not simply usurp payphones or land lines. Mobile telephones and Internet-everywhere access changed the pace of communication altogether, creating a new and (for some) lucrative landscape. This transformation changed the role of public telephones but has not eliminated them.

Folks who depend on public telephones now walk farther and work harder to make phone calls. Verizon will exit the payphone and calling card business over the next 18 months. This is a positive development that leaves public telephony in New York to the capable hands of TCC Teleplex, Telebeam, EHUC (my favorite), and other independent payphone providers whose phones (in my opinion) always worked more reliably and simply sound better than Verizon’s. Pacific Telemanagement Services (PTS) has assumed ownership of a large quantity of Verizon’s payphones, with the transition expected to be finished by 2014. The transition from Verizon to PTS payphones and other trends have brought some interesting nuances to the use of those public telephones, as I will discuss in a future posting.

I expect to add to the People Using Payphones photo essay as an ongoing collection, another in my accumulational series of photos and scanned images that will one day fill the Internet to its brim. If you are familiar with some of my other web projects you may have noticed that once I get started on a subject I almost never let it go. Some of my other photo piles include Umbrella Carcasses, Tombstone Portraits, Receipts, and Abandoned Baby Carriages. Add PUPs (People Using Payphones) to the mix!