SNEAK PEEK: Prairie Modernist Noire

Jeanne Randolph documents Manitoba’s disappearing phone boxes.

Along with grain elevators and family farms, we can add another disappearing prairie icon – the humble telephone booth.

Winnipeg-based artist, psychiatrist and cultural critic Jeanne Randolph became fascinated with these vintage relics and began documenting them with her old iPhone 5C.

The resulting project, Prairie Modernist Noire: The Disappearance of the Manitoba Telephone Box, is viewable as an online exhibition at Paul Petro Contemporary Art in Toronto.

Composed of 31 images taken over six months, Randolph used a list provided by Manitoba Telecom Services (now Bell MTS), to track down an aging technology cut short by the smart-phone revolution.

“For more than 50 years, pay phones stood as small modernist buildings,” Randolph says. “They were built to stand and to withstand, to be mended efficiently after every attack by weather, vandalism, car crashes and thrown rocks.

"Now they are neglected; each and every booth is depreciating in melancholy decline – until Bell/MTS uproots them and drags them away.”

Randolph's travels took her from Flin Flon in the province’s north to Emerson, a few miles from Manitoba’s border with the United States. The booths are generally a forlorn lot, standing alone on country roads or beside trash bins at campgrounds, mostly the worse for wear.

Part of the project's charm is Randolph’s accompanying texts. For instance, she writes: “To me, a booth is like a spaceship captained by Yves St. Laurent, and it’s landing in a Dollar Store.” 

Elsewhere, she recalls her encounter with a young security guard as she documented a pair of booths.

 “An adorable what appeared to be 14-year-old boy in his security guard outfit, hat and all, approached me. He said, ‘I’m supposed to ask you what you’re doing.’ And I said, ‘Don’t you worry, son. I’m from MTS. We are doing a survey to make sure we have documented all the phone booths in Manitoba and these two are on our list. We want to preserve pictures of them for our historical archive.’ 

“And he exclaimed, ‘I’m a part of history!’ I wanted to take him with me.” ■ 

Prairie Modernist Noire: The Disappearance of the Manitoba Telephone Box is an online exhibition at Paul Petro Contemporary Art in Toronto.

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