We recently visited Istanbul and came across a real variety of phone boxes. I traveled here many years ago but it was the trip before my decision to photograph phone boxes on my travels so it was good to go back and make up for missed opportunities.
I like this one hidden within a stall, behind the Blue Mosque…
Me at the airport with the English phone box version in the background:
I hadn’t realised that Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure (1989) involved using a phone box as a time machine. More recent tv has a phone being used as … a phone, in True Detective:
An old one from the X-files (‘Pusher’, Season 2):
We visited Tilbury Fort this afternoon, located across from Gravesend on the other side of the Thames. It’s described as one of the finest surviving 17th century forts in England. There is a small museum display in the Officers’ barracks which includes a phone set from WWII (I think)…
I visited Manchester yesterday…
and here is a photo of street art that recently? appeared in Manchester, in the Northern Quarter. I think it was titled ‘Wonder woman’:
‘The X-Files’, naturally. So many episodes have shots of phone boxes.
Roadrunners
Surekill
Just saw ‘The Grand Budapest Hotel’. Fabulous movie by one of my favourite directors. I really do love Wes Anderson’s way of looking at the world. Anyway there is a lovely shot of a telephone box on stilts, pained with black and yellow zig-zags, in the middle of a snow covered field.
I am currently reading Morrissey’s ‘Autobiogrpahy’ and enjoying it. He has a very descriptive, evocative prose style. p. 179 says…”The realities of each northern day at the turn of the 1980s played out against a hardened backdrop in late repentance, because the north is a separate country – one of wild night landscapes of affectionate affliction. There are no known technological links apart from the telephone box on the corner, and this can always be relied upon to be out of order.”
Spoiler alert if you have seen ‘Stoker’. (The second shot stars the great Australian actress Jackie Weaver.)
Here are some oldies that hadn’t made it onto the site yet. (Suzette stars in Budapest and it’s me in the middle box in Krakow.)
Hungary, Budapest (1997?)
Poland, Krakow (1997?)
Slovenia, Ljubljana
Slovenia, Stanjel
Coming out of the phone booth: phone box references in modern subculture
There is an article in the latest ‘Fortean Times’ (Krulos, T. 2014. Heroes in the night. In: Fortean Times, Vol. 314 May 2014, pp.28-35) which discusses the modern phenomenon of Real Life Superheroes (people who dress in the style of a superhero and roam the streets looking to fight crime). What amused me was the coining of the term ‘coming out of the phone booth’ – used to refer to the time when you reveal your lifestyle to your friends and family.
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