In 2022, New York lost its final pay phone. Whilst it’s hard to make the case for pay phones in an era where even young kids have smartphones, they served as a very visible reminder, maybe even a pentimento, of an era long gone. A time where constant contact would be unimaginable, when plans were made in advance and you just had to turn up at a set time and place, when people seemed…slightly less manic. In Daniel Weiss’ Pay Phone, the photographer set out to catalogue New York’s pay phones before they became extinct. Encompassing a decade of work, the monograph is a love letter to a New York of the past and an era of the city that is truly gone. Speaking to us below, Weiss tells us what pay phones symbolised for him and whether New York City will ever feel the same again.

Barry Pierce: Tell us about the concept behind Pay Phone – what attracted you to photographing pay phones?
Daniel Weiss: Pay Phone is a meditation on the last two decades of the public telephone in NYC. My record of the pay phone within the city landscape, a combination of recent NY history and documentary style photography. The pay phones interested me and I included them in my pictures whenever possible.

BP: What does the removal of the last pay phone in NYC symbolise to you?
DW: It is the end of an era, the end of the New York that I grew up in. We’re still all packed in here together physically, but long ago we traded human interaction for the quiet isolation of screens. I try not to include cellular phones in my photography.

“Long ago we traded human interaction for the quiet isolation of screens.”

BP: How do the portraits relate to the pay phone images? Did you simply go up to people and ask to take their picture?
DW: The phone booths were the perfect backdrop for portraits. I used them like a stage, to help separate the subject from the noise of the city. Sometimes the booths themselves were the subject, with their advertisements providing commentary. Most of the portraits were taken in the moment though sometimes there was a short conversation.

BP: Where did you tend to go for these images? Did you focus on a certain area?
DW: All of the pictures are taken in Manhattan. The book has pictures from all over the island — from the Lower East Side to the Upper West Side. Many in midtown which had the highest concentration of pay phones and people.

BP: What was it like to work on your first monograph?
DW: I learned a lot, though mostly about what it really takes to get a book into the world. It was always my intention for my pictures to end up in book form. Right now I have ten more books I hope to publish.

BP: Who are your main photographic inspirations?
DW: Walker Evans, Robert Frank, and Diane Arbus – each documented the American vernacular with unflinching honesty. Their work taught me early on the kind of photographs I wanted to take and what a meaningful photograph can do.

“The phone booths were the perfect backdrop for portraits. I used them like a stage, to help separate the subject from the noise of the city.”

BP: The photographs in the book were taken between 2008 and 2020 – how have you seen New York change within this time? How would you say New York feels now?
DW: The city has changed dramatically, losing a lot of the character I was interested in capturing. This book captures it, and acts as a historical document of the city. As pay phones fade further into our memory the pictures will only get better. Now it has become more difficult to photograph here, there is too much I want to exclude from my frame. But I like a challenge and there are still pictures to make. New York is still my home.

Buy Pay Phone here.
Follow Daniel on Instagram.