END OF THE LINE

A photographer sets out to capture a city’s last pay phones before they disappear

- David Dudley

We’re heading north up Rochester’s Goodman Street, past pizza places and gas stations and narrow wood-framed homes, when Eric Kunsman spots a red-crowned kiosk in front of the parking lot of a convenience store/smoke shop. It’s a payphone, one he’d probably seen many times before but had never truly seen until now.

“Look at that!” he says. We pull over, and he pops the hatch on his Toyota SUV. “I can’t believe I missed this one.”

In the back, Kunsman keeps photography equipment—a vintage Hasselblad film camera in a suitcase-size case. It’s an attention-getting rig, and as he sets it up and trains it on the battered telephone, the owner of the smoke shop emerges, frowning.

Kunsman is very familiar with this part of the process and with an enormous grin he explains himself: He’s a photographer, and he takes pictures of pay phones.

Specifically, Kunsman, who teaches photography at the Rochester Institute of Technology, is engaged in a multiyear project to document every surviving pay phone in and around the city in upstate New York. As of 2018 that would be 1,455 phones, according to a dogeared list of locations provided by Frontier Communications Corp., the telecommunications company that operates the machines that remain in Monroe County. So far, Kunsman has captured about 900 of them on film. Perhaps 35% of them, he says, still work.