It would have been too easy for photographer Phillip Toledano simply to have taken pictures of phone sex operators, assembled them into book form, and called it a day: after all, even the most enthusiastic of phone sex fans must be aware on some level of the disconnect between the fantasy they're creating with whoever's on the other end of the line and the reality of what that person is really like, and a bunch of images that just illustrated that concept visually over and over again would've gotten boring pretty quickly. What makes Toledano's "Phone Sex" so interesting, though, is that that he gives each of his subjects an opportunity to discuss their careers in their own words--and while we could've done without the free verse formatting the tales they have to tell are pretty fascinating, from observations that phone sex is just another form of customer service to one woman's story about a particular fantasy one of her callers had involving some undigested asparagus. But we'll let you read that one for yourself.
· Phillip Toledano's "Phone Sex" (phonesexthebook.com)
· "Offbeat Artist: The Faces of Phone Sex Operators" (digitaljournal.com)
· Phillip Toledano Photography (mrtoledano.com)