From Prairie Modernist Noir: The Disappearance of the Manitoba Telephone Booth by Jeanne Randolph. 2018/2020 archival ink-jet print, edition of two 8 1/2 x 11 inches, photos courtesy the artist and Paul Petro Contemporary Art, Toronto. Jeanne Randolph took these photos in 2016, using an iPhone. She was given a list of telephone booths in the province by a “mole” at Manitoba Telephone Systems (Bell/MTS); she travelled as far north as the 54th parallel in Flin Flon, and as far south as Emerson, near the Manitoba US border.
Jeanne Randolph writes: “For more than fifty years payphones stood as small modernist buildings. They were built to stand and to withstand, to be mended efficiently after every attack by weather, vandalism, car crashes and thrown rocks. Now they are neglected; each and every booth is depreciating in melancholy decline—until Bell/MTS uproots them and drags them away.”
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Now this is not lens distortion. That is the most dismal phone booth I found on my travels. It’s in the Whiteshell, or was, because, I think, just towards the end of my safari, Dan mentioned to me that he’d ripped out one in the Whiteshell and he wondered whether I’d gotten a photo of it in time. It was about to uproot itself with a grand topple. You can see, it’s so touching; it’s yearning for mother earth.
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This is a scene on the Trans-Canada outside of Austin, MB. It’s too murky to discern what’s there—a closer view is only slightly brighter. I was disappointed that at a distance from the object of my desire, distortions aren’t especially obvious.
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Here it is from another view. I wanted to document this sort of view as often as I could—the forsaken telephone booth among its injured friends. As you can see, in a way, it’s in its own forlorn community.
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This is a classic. Not to you, I do understand.
This belongs to the Desolate Phone Booth collection. Also the Derelict, Sleazy Brother of the phone booth collection. This little ne’er-do-well is on the Trans-Canada toward Headingly. Or was. I’ve sped by often, trying to get out of town. Then one day I looked and it was no more. Now, I have to say, that is not just because of erosion and acts of god. A wonderful man at MTS understood this project and he gave me a list of all the phone booths in Manitoba. Even as I was tracking them they were disappearing. This one probably did get pulled out by its roots.
And notice the goofy distortion here. I know it’s derelict but those poles, they were definitely not leaning into the wind.
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Now, this…this…THIS is…a resort. Wrong time of year. There was a swimming pool, a frozen swimming pool.
This place is called The Lilac, and it advertises itself with a logo of a great big blue dolphin. The big blue dolphin is “standing up” on its tail fin at the edge of the pool. You tell your child—and they have to be pretty small to get through his you-know-what under the tailfin—to go up the little stairs inside the dolphin and then jump out of the dolphin’s mouth into the swimming pool.
It’s the good-times version of Jonah and the Whale.