Andrew Testa. NY Times. Redhill, England © Re-post 2018.
By Paul Goldfinger, photography editor@ Blogfinger.
I hope the Times will forgive our borrowing this image from their wonderful piece on December 20. It was “The Year in Pictures 2018” The Times has the best photography in journalism, although so many of their images would be considered “fine art.” Despite all the digital advances in photography, The Times photographers seem to retain a classical style as in the image above.
These phone booths are from London where such red booths were ubiquitous. I wonder how many movies over the years showed these red icons.
Some years ago, I was attending a course on creative photography at the Maine Photographic Workshops in Rockport. Today it is the Maine Media Workshops. The instructor sent our small group on an assignment. We were to photograph an “empty space.” So I drove a short distance to Camden, a small, lovely, seaside town. I walked around looking for an empty space. “Is this a trick question?” I thought.
Just then, as twilight was approaching I saw a phone booth, sitting all by itself downtown. No one was inside it, so, voila!—an empty space. Homework time was over, and I returned to Rockport happy with my dose of nothing—or not exactly nothing—or maybe plenty of nothing.
In Andrew Testa’s photograph above is a sea of empty phone booths, but it seems so sad and nostalgic now that phone booths are no more. But Testa’s booths are much more empty than mine, because mine would again be occupied by people, whose lives are enhanced by the phones inside–lovers, thinkers, artists, kids calling home, gamblers—etc. –all kinds of folks, but now no one would ever again enrich their lives by stepping into one of those empty red spaces.
ELIANA PITMAN from the Gershwin classic Porgy and Bess. This is from her album Positivamente Eliana.