For some reason most of my street photography seems to happen in Manhattan. "New York Telephone Conversation" was taken on 8th Avenue at 34th Street, around 4pm on October 28, as the city was shutting down in anticipation of Hurricane Sandy making landfall.
What I see: The handsets have been left disconnected and ignored, dropped off the hook in an act of civic disregard for both the telephones and those who may need to use it. Dirty, discarded, and anachronistic, they have been left to their own devices and seem to be content with each other's company. But of course their apparent conjunction is a trick of perspective and the flattening of the picture space as they dangle alone.
The yellow phone is striking and unusual, but the focus is quite literally on the mundane black handset in the foreground, denying us the ability to make this photo into a story about novelty or the unexpected.
Despite this being New York there is no sense of bustling crowds; the foreground is empty sidewalk that adds a remoteness to the scene. The few people in the photo are represented just by their hurrying legs, and are dark, distant, and blurred. The disconnection and the superficial passing relationships aren't simply limited to these disregarded telephones.
What I did: Taking this photo involved a certain amount of patience to achieve the empty sidewalk; having the road empty as well proved too much to ask. It was shot from a crouched position to create the alignment with the phones' handsets, using a short telephoto lens at a wide aperture to blur everything but the black handset.
I chose to focus only on the black handset in order to stop the yellow one from dominating the image. It doesn't need the added weight, and the two have a closer visual balance in the finished image. The brighter colour also makes the yellow handset come forward visually, while the black one recedes, adding to the illusion that they're close to each other.
Post-processing for this photo was fairly straightforward. I straightened and trued the angles, adjusted the tones, and tightened the framing to remove some extraneous elements from the left side of the frame.
My assessment: I like the idea behind this photo, and think it comes across fairly well. However, the right edge is cluttered and detracts from the story. I've given it a three-star rating in my Lightroom catalog, marking it as a good photo, but not one that's remarkable in its own right. At the same time its personality is strong enough that I see it being a bad fit for a series, although it might be able to join a looser grouping of some sort.
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