Telephone by Ed Ruscha shows a public telephone kiosk cropped to its upper portion — the black fascia bearing TELEPHONE in white sans-serif capitals, the glass panels of the booth below catching light at diagonal angles, the whole structure set against a dark atmospheric ground. The rendering is soft and tonal, the lithographic process giving the image a nocturnal quality, the booth illuminated from within as though it is the only lit structure on an otherwise dark street. Nobody is using it. Nobody is nearby.

The telephone box was one of the great pieces of democratic infrastructure in twentieth-century American life — the device that allowed anyone, anywhere, to reach anyone else, the physical node of a communication network that defined how communities stayed connected across distance. By 1993, when Ruscha made this print, that infrastructure was beginning its long obsolescence. Mobile phones were still expensive and uncommon, but the direction of travel was clear: within a decade the telephone kiosk would begin its transformation from essential public utility to redundant urban furniture, the booths emptying out and eventually disappearing from street corners entirely.

The Archi-Props series catalogued exactly this kind of structure — the telephone kiosk, the upholstery shop, the tyre centre, the library — treating the functional architecture of American commerce and civic life with the same flat attentiveness Ruscha had brought to petrol stations thirty years earlier. What the series could not have anticipated was how quickly some of its subjects would pass from the contemporary into the historical: Telephone, made in an edition of twenty in 1993, is now a document of something that no longer exists in the form it shows, the booth glowing in the dark on a street that has long since found other ways to communicate.

For more information or to buy Telephone by Ed Ruscha, contact our specialists using the enquiry button above.