Why am I doing this?
It happened on a sunny morning in Merida (Mexico) in December 2001.
We have walked around the city and came across this plaza, where plenty of public telephones where standing and nobody was using one.
I thought to myself that one day this method of communication will no longer exist, people will walk around with some sort of mobile handset and those public telephones will all have disappeared.
So I took this picture...
... and decided to do this in every country I will be in going forward.
Years later I thought it would be nice to have pictures of public telephones of all countries in the world, however it took me until mid 2005 to accept the fact that I will probably never have such a collection if I do not start asking other people to help me.
It was actually a colleague in Kazakhstan who triggered that thought. I was doing some test calls for her out of my german office when I thought, that I could ask her for a picture of a public telephone in Kazakhstan (since this was the first time I had contact to somebody in Kazakhstan and it will likely not happen very often again in my life).
I asked and 2 days later (thanks to the boom of digital cameras) I received this picture from Helena:
Since then I have asked many of my colleagues, friends and virtually anybody who made the mistake to disclose some travel plans to me whether he could help me with my collection.
Many have helped and I would like to thank everybody a lot for this.
However, my journey is not over yet. I am still missing around 70% of the worlds countries (actually my definition is regions with their own ITU telephone country code).
Any help on missing countries is highly appreciated.
Once I hit 150 countries, I will do what I wanted to do from the very beginning, which is asking one (or more) of the telecom museums to display parts of the collection.
I find it still amazing how different public telephones are looking like in all these countries when you think that they are all built for the same purpose - to communicate with people that are one way or another important for you.
Jan