Once vital to daily life, phone booths are disappearing. This photo collection captures their quiet decline and the stories they leave behind.
Ah, the pay phone.
Stunning designs of time’s passage.
Some housed in booths; others crowded sidewalks.
A few remain here and there among millions of people chatting on mobile phones, tiny powerhouses of communication that have replaced their distant coin-based cousins.
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Phone booths have brightened cities throughout the world. Each country had its own unique designs from underdeveloped ramshackle home-designed structures of steel to the sleek European ultra-modern marvels of civilization.
Large homemade steel phone booth in Myanmar. Photo by Matthew Bamberg
Ultra-modern pay phone in Europe. Photo by Matthew Bamberg
When one thinks of documentary photography, images of celebrations, wars, famines, love, evil, and horror. In other words, objects, places, and events as they once were.
An initial foray into documentary photography c…
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