Life-Lines Throughout the United States
by Eric Kunsman
portfolio shortlisted call 'Urbanautica Institute Awards 2024', 2024
Category: Memories and Traditions
This body of work is a companion series to my project, “Felicific Calculus: Technology as a Social Marker of Race, Class, & Economics in Rochester, NY,” to demonstrate how communities throughout the United States are facing the same dire situation. Throughout the United States, many individuals are being left behind by technology, whether that is for communication or Internet access. Our society has become one in which you must have access to these tools to be provided support services and a job, or you are left behind, widening the gap between the lower and middle classes.
Often, this outdated technology is also used to label individuals or areas of a community where they can be found as social markers without further knowledge. The individuals I have met who still rely on payphones have stated, "I hate how people look at me like I am doing something wrong when I am using the payphone.” Those individuals have explained that they are typically calling their families to check in or for support.
My work aims to raise the following questions: how do we ensure access to basic needs for a sustainable community, such as communication, shelter, and food, without labeling those relying on support?
Why has the United Kingdom decided to save their iconic payphones, convert them to digital ones, and install other emergency necessities such as defibrillators in the red booths?
Once the payphones are gone, how will we communicate in a natural disaster similar to Hurricane Katrina & Sandy?
The payphone may be a symbol of a different era. Still, we must remember how we use technology as a social marker and often forget those individuals who cannot keep up with fundamental technological advancements.
Review by URBANAUTICA
Eric Kunsman’s photographic research was born out of circumstance. During the relocation of his studio to a neighborhood of Rochester, New York—often stigmatized as unsafe—he noticed a detail that many dismissed or ridiculed: the continued presence of functioning payphones. For most, these devices were nothing more than obsolete remnants of a bygone era, signs of decay rather than of endurance. For Kunsman, however, the payphones became the trigger for a body of work that has extended over several years, opening questions that resonate far beyond the streets of Rochester. How do technologies—whether outdated or current—function as social markers that both reflect and reinforce economic inequality, exclusion, and access to essential communication within contemporary society? What do payphones reveal about who is remembered, who is forgotten, and how society affect the boundaries of belonging in our communities?These questions form the conceptual core of Kunsman’s project Life-Lines Throughout the United States, which is closely linked to his earlier series Felicific Calculus. Together, these bodies of work argue that communities across the United States face the same dire situation: many people are being left behind by technological progress. In contemporary society, access to digital tools is no longer optional—it has become a prerequisite for employment, for receiving social services, and for maintaining connections with loved ones. Without access to the Internet or a private phone, entire groups are marginalized, their exclusion deepening the already wide divide between lower and middle classes.
The payphone, then, is more than a relic of technology. It becomes a visible sign by which society categorizes neighborhoods and individuals, often unfairly. The testimonies collected by Kunsman reveal the stigma attached to their use. One user explained, “I hate how people look at me like I am doing something wrong when I am using the payphone.” In reality, such individuals might often simply calling home, checking in with family, or seeking support. By photographing these devices and listening to those who still depend on them, Kunsman underscores a more profound question: how do we provide access to basic needs—communication, shelter, food—without simultaneously labeling or shaming those who rely on collective support systems?
The comparison with the United Kingdom further illuminates the cultural and political stakes of this issue. While the U.S. dismantles its payphone infrastructure, Britain has preserved its iconic red booths, converting them into digital stations or even equipping them with emergency necessities such as defibrillators. Kunsman invites us to ask: once payphones disappear from American cities, how will people communicate during natural disasters like Hurricane Katrina or Hurricane Sandy? The payphone may symbolize an earlier era, but it also represents resilience and public accessibility—qualities that risk being erased in a society increasingly dependent on private devices and corporate infrastructures.
Photography, in Kunsman’s project, is never neutral. It is a choice, a conscious act of directing attention toward the overlooked. By turning his lens toward the payphone, the artist highlights the social inequalities inscribed in the American landscape. The act of framing these devices forces us to confront the conditions of the neighborhoods in which they persist, exposing the unequal distribution of resources and opportunity. In this sense, the payphone is not only a technological artifact; it is a mirror of systemic disparity.
Yet the payphone also belongs to the public sphere in a broader sense. Like other public services, it raises fundamental questions about the scope and meaning of the “commons” in contemporary society. In an age of what could be called “molecular capitalism,” where each individual carries their own personal device, what is the role of a public telephone? Kunsman’s photographs do not provide definitive answers, but they provoke us to rethink the meaning of shared infrastructures in an increasingly privatized world.
The seriality of his project—the systematic mapping and recording of payphones across different geographies—adds another layer of meaning. Through repetition and persistence, Kunsman builds a visual archive that insists on being remembered. Each image reinforces the presence of these devices in the viewer’s gaze, creating a rhythm that resists forgetting. Photography here is not only documentary but performative: it establishes memory, safeguards imaginaries, and contaminates the collective visual record with reminders of what society might prefer to erase.
Finally, there is an archeo-visual dimension to the work. In the rapid acceleration of consumer culture, the payphone appears as a kind of totem of obsolescence. It testifies to the speed with which technologies, landscapes, and even communities are discarded once deemed out of date. By photographing them, Kunsman rescues these objects from invisibility and reveals their dual nature: as signs of abandonment and as markers of resilience. They remind us that progress is not linear, and that the traces of the past remain embedded in the social fabric, shaping how we perceive places and people.
In the end, Kunsman’s photographs of payphones are about society’s values, about who gets left behind, and about the importance of maintaining public access to essential forms of connection. They are about memory, resilience, and the urgency of recognizing that even the most ordinary objects carry political weight. By insisting on the significance of something so seemingly banal, Kunsman reminds us that photography has the power to reframe reality and to confront it.
also from Urbanautica Institute Awards 2024