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.”