Phone home: capturing Cork city's last remaining phone boxes
Like post boxes, phone boxes were once ubiquitous. This summer, artist Ciara Rodgers captured the last battered and graffitied phone boxes still clinging to the streets of Cork.
Defunct for the most part, I’ll somehow miss noticing the human scale boxes that clung cumbersomely to the side of footpaths. It’s surprising, no, miraculous, that they have lasted this long really. Graffitied, grimy relics signalling the final years of the boxy analogue era, many will be relieved by the current removal process of these “eyesores” from Cork City Centre.
I owned my first mobile phone at the age of sixteen, a Motorola, or maybe it was an Ericsson?... whichever one the banks were giving away for free when you set up a student bank account in 1998. Inevitably, as a disorganised teen, I would be caught out without credit or a dyeing battery and would enter the weighty door of the payphone box to call for a spin home.
I’m recalling how sticky the handsets often were to the touch and the stale air that would circulate in the echoey concave mouthpieces. I also feel like the handsets were all heavy and sieve-like, hard blue plastic and holey. My cousin John recently reminded me that “the metal coils that connected the receiver weren’t compliant in the slightest. They’d snake away from you, slaloming off the already shattered glass.” But phone boxes were like greenhouses in summer if fully intact. Between bus stops and phone boxes, it’s curious to think how often glass panels must have needed replacing in the nineties.
This summer, I sought out and created a photo series of the last remaining Cork city phone boxes on Polaroid film. An elder millennial, I seem to be engaging in a kind of nostalgia for a time that I only half lived through, one foot firmly in the digital age, one foot lightly lagging behind. Is this an attempt to return to tangibility at a time when all our stuff is stored in the cloud?
Polaroid Cameras, record players, mid-century modern furniture, all these things millennials surround themselves with happen to come from a time when housing was affordable and each successive music genre was new and exciting. This may explain my reluctance to say farewell to the boxes - that, or, still sometimes disorganised, the aforementioned back up plan when my phone battery dies.
And then there is something embodied, like entering the phone box, about my relationship to the medium of Polaroid. I use it for footing in real time, real space. There is a clunkiness to the mechanics of the cameras, noisy, heavy with a sense of anticipation as I wait for the chemicals to settle and reveal my image. After shooting, I immediately pop the pocket-sized photograph into my clothing, body heat and light deprivation aiding in optimal film development.
As I continue to explore the limits of instant film, it acts as a witness to moments in my artistic activities examining city spaces and themes like nostalgia, ruins, failure and self-determination. I monitor the slippages of time in space and how our changing built environment can affect ones physical senses, emotions, and motivations. I am happily forced by the nature of the medium to slow my actions and think about what I produce for the box- like Polaroid frame, to really think, what I am trying to communicate?
Boxes.
Ciara Rodgers is a visual artist based in Munster. A studio member at Backwater Artists Group, in Cork city, she holds an MA in Art from MTU Crawford College of Art and Design. Rodgers is an Assistant Lecturer in Art History and Studio modules in SETU Waterford and a board member at Cork Printmakers. You can view her artwork at ciararodgers.ie
Ciara’s recent exhibitions include: Folly|Façade (Solo) GOMA Waterford, IE, 2024; GREEN MOUTH (Solo) performance, SIRIUS, Cobh Cork, IE, 2023; Come What May, LIVESTOCK, MART, Dublin, IE, 2023; a city of beautiful nonsense (Solo), Studio 12, Cork IE; ARTSevilla 2019|Bauhaus: a 100 años de la revolución total de un lenguaje, Seville, ES, 2019.
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A lovely tribute and it's sad to see the phone boxes awaiting their fate. The only means of communication when I was young. I remember waiting in line to make a phone call in all kinds of weather. Waiting for a call was the worse experience as someone else could be on the phone at the time of your expected incoming call.
There were actual phone books in the old boxes. Dog-eared and well used, but never abused. You could look up a number! And the Golden Pages, probably worth a fortune on eBay now.