Thomas Wolff · Photography: Street Life

		▷▷▷
For the younger visitors of my Web site: That is a pay phone; a relic from the dark days of immobile communication devices in which in order to exchange meaningful messages such as "how's it going?", "what'ye doing?", "what's the weather like at your side of town?" you had to look out for a pay phone, attached somewhere to a filthy house wall, hidden in a dark corner or set up next to an acridly reeking public toilet at the railway station. The bacteria-covered plastic bone, encrusted with a coating of earwax, grease, snot, spit and street dirt, usually situated right next to a set of likewise smeary, generally unlighted filth-covered keys (in earlier days a rotary dial plate whose numbers were arranged in a counter-clockwise circle), served to speak in to on one side, and to listen to on the other. It was unisex, color-neutral, big enough to be safely held by the hands of a grown-up man and user-friendly since it did not have to be flipped or slid open, and it was instinctively and intuitively clear to anyone how to hold the damn thing - without having to read a 228 pages user manual full of acronyms, abbreviations, Anglicisms and goofy gobbledygook prior to the first use. With a light shuddering in disgust it could simply be taken into ones hand and... well, image this: after inserting a coin or two it was indeed capable of a noise- and trouble-free phone connection. All without any Hello? Hello.... can you hear me? I can't hear you! Hello? Heeelloooo... ? Hyperactive fidgeting or self-important swaggering during the phone call was kept within tolerable limits by a cord that connected the talking plastic bone to the big fat shabby main unit. The cord served to disburden your tiring body by hooking yourself into it during a nerve-racking conversation, to wear the talking bone around your neck while digging into your pockets for loose change, or to kill time by playing funny little "tying knots" games while being stuck on hold forever (back then still a rather rare experience, though). Caution: Hazard of strangulation! Unfortunately, the Telekom failed to add disclaimers to the talking plastic bones. No, with a pay phone you could not send sms or mms in between... or have call-waiting... or establish a conference call... take a photograph... surf the Web... let satellites revolving around the globe precisely determine within centimeters the position of the filthy corner reeking of urine you are standing in... feed a Pokémon... dry your hair... or brew up a coffee. The most mentionable advantage of those old-fashioned cordless pay phones - being especially in favor of the communication habits of the adored womanhood - was that, given that they have brought a sufficient amount of coins, they were able to light-heartedly talk on the phone for ages. Pay phones did not have rechargeable batteries! For more details, ask your grandparents... or Wikipedia.
Feldkirch, Austria. February 2011.

Canon EOS 5D Mk II, EF 24-70 mm f 2.8 @ 70 mm, ISO 640, f 1:5.6.
Exposure bracketing with 3 free-hand shots at 1/100 s, 1/400 s & 1/25 s. Exposure compensation -0,67 EV. HDR & tonemapping by Photomatix.