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Alan K | all galleries >> England >> 2019 Day 02, London, England (Mon 09 Sep 2019) > 190909_165921_0604 Once Upon A Time
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09-Sep-2019 AKMC

190909_165921_0604 Once Upon A Time

Intersection of Great George Street and Parliament Square

There is a land before living memory where people did not have portable communication devices in their pockets. It's hard to remember now, but back in those prehistoric times if you wanted to contact someone and you were away from home in England (or Australia come to that), you had to find one of these red boxes with a wall mounted device called a "public telephone" inside them.

The people that we see here do not seem to be doing it correctly. One of them actually needs to be inside the box, picking up a heavy object called a handset and speaking into one end of it while listening on the other end.

However if I didn't know any better - and I don't - I would suspect that they are simply using the red telephone box as I am; that is as a prop for a photograph. Only in my case I have the advantage of having them as props as well. I suspect that the phone still works, but I also suspect that it's there primarily as a tourist attraction rather than a functional object these days.

I took a couple of bursts of shots here; some have cyclists and other pedestrians, some don't. Originally I settled on this one which had a cyclist (with motion blur) coming down the road one way (from the right), while the pedestrian that we see was walking rapidly the other. But as I was editing I had second thoughts; specifically, "What really IS the subject here?" So while it was tempting to have the many and varied elements in the shot, in the end I opted to go in tight and keep the subject simple.


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