(Pics) Posterchild Finds New Uses for Old Phone Booths

Posterchild has embarked on a street art project which envisions a new future for the underused and abandoned pay phone booths which dot the urban landscape. He’s created a series of advertisements that announce fictional upgrades to the booths such as public restrooms, superhero changing stations and prayer stations.

He shares the story of an interaction with an older woman as he was installing the above poster:

As I’m talking she’s staring straight ahead and very intently at the poster, brow furrowed, and nodding her head slowly. I can’t read her emotions, so I continue: “And people, well, men mostly, are always peeing in these phone booths. They often are so stinky that I can’t imagine anyone being able to use them, so I’m trying to suggest a change. Solve two problems. We need more bathrooms. Sometimes my girlfriend has to hold it for hours, until it’s painful-”

At this point, she turns to me, still looking very serious, and says “-And when you get to be my age, sometimes you can’t!”

Turning back to the poster, she points her finger at it, and shaking her arm, says: “I like this. I can get behind this. I like this.”

I think she realized at this point that I wasn’t just a nice young Jewish man working for an advertising company, but someone doing something that I’m not supposed to: she began to leave, and as she left, she smiled at me, and said- “Good Luck!”

Posterchild’s Blade Diary