The Future Was Already There

While I was living in Mexico, I often went walking with my camera.

At the time, I had been working for approximately nine months in a project-management position contracted with Telmex, so the company and its services were already very familiar to me.

During one of those walks, I spotted this public telephone.

The first thing that caught my attention was how heavily it was leaning.

Then there was the telephone itself.

TELMEX was written across the top.

At the bottom was an advertisement for Infinitum, the company's high-speed Internet service.

That relationship interested me.

Here was a public telephone representing one form of communication while the same company was using the telephone to advertise another technology that was already changing how people communicated.

That contradiction was part of what I saw when I raised the camera.

The telephone was still standing there.

It was still carrying the Telmex name.

It was still part of the street.

But something about the future was already attached to it.

The Future Was Already There centers on a Telmex public telephone encountered along a street in Mexico City in 2018.

The telephone dominates the composition through both its scale and its pronounced physical lean. Surrounding architectural lines remain comparatively vertical, making the telephone's tilted position immediately apparent.

The horizontal composition preserves the urban environment rather than isolating the telephone as an object. Traffic, buildings, vegetation, a nearby service station and other elements of the active street remain visible around it.

Two pieces of corporate identification create the photograph's central relationship.

TELMEX appears prominently above the telephone, while an advertisement for Infinitum, Telmex's Internet service, appears directly beneath it.

For Colón, who was working in Mexico in a project-management position contracted with Telmex at the time, the relationship was recognizable when the photograph was made.

The photograph therefore operates on two levels of observation: the unusual physical condition of the leaning public telephone and the coexistence of different generations of communication technology on the same piece of infrastructure.

At the time, I saw the contradiction.

Years later, I can see more clearly the transition surrounding it.

I would not say that Internet service simply replaced the telephone. Communication changed in more complicated ways than that.

But public telephones were becoming less necessary as the technologies around them evolved.

That is what makes the Infinitum advertisement so interesting to me now.

The old telephone did not know it was part of a transition.

It was simply standing there, leaning beside the street, continuing to do the job for which it had been installed.

Yet attached to it was an advertisement for a different way of connecting people.

The company providing the telephone was simultaneously promoting technology that belonged to the changing future of communication.

I did not need to predict exactly what would happen.

Both periods were already there in front of me.

One was the telephone.

The other was written across the bottom.

Preserved as the one hundred forty-second accessioned photograph in the Francisco Colón Studio Photography Wing, The Future Was Already There was made in Mexico City, Mexico, on December 1, 2018.

The photograph records a Telmex public telephone encountered during one of Colón's walks through the city while living and working in Mexico.

At the time, Colón was working in a project-management position contracted with Telmex, giving him an existing familiarity with the company represented in the scene.

The telephone's pronounced lean initially attracted his attention. A second relationship provided the photograph with its broader significance: the Telmex identification above the public telephone and the Infinitum high-speed Internet advertisement below it.

Rather than treating the photograph as a generalized prediction about the disappearance of telephones, the Studio record preserves the narrower observation present at the time of exposure: older public communication infrastructure and a newer communication technology were being presented together on the same object.

Later reflection expands upon that original observation without rewriting it. The photograph now also records a period of technological transition in which the role of public telephones was changing as Internet-based and other forms of communication became increasingly prevalent.