Eric Kunsman

Eric T. Kunsman (b. 1975) was born and raised in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. While in high school, he was heavily influenced by the death of the steel industry and its place in American history. The exposure to the work of Walker Evans during this time hooked Eric onto photography. Eric had the privilege to study under Lou Draper, who became Eric’s most formative mentor. He credits Lou with influencing his approach as an educator, photographer, and contributing human being.

Currently, he is a photographer and book artist based out of Rochester, New York. Eric is an Assistant Professor at the Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT) in the Visual Communications Studies Department at the National Technical Institute for the Deaf and an adjunct professor for the School of Photographic Arts & Sciences.

In addition to lectures, he provides workshops on topics including his artistic practice, digital printing, and digital workflow processes. He also provides industry seminars for the highly regarded Printing Applications Lab at RIT. His photographs and books are exhibited internationally and are in several collections. He currently owns Booksmart Studio, which is a fine art digital printing studio, specializing in numerous techniques and services for photographers and book artists on a collaborative basis.

There's no “given,” formula for what demands Eric’s focus as a photographer. Eric is as drawn to the landscapes and neglected towns of the American southwest as he is to the tensions of struggling rustbelt cities in the U.S. northeast. Eric is attracted to objects left behind, especially those that hint at a unique human narrative, a story waiting to be told. Eric’s current work explores one of those relics: working payphones hidden in plain sight throughout the neighborhood near his studio in Rochester, NY. Associates suggested they signified a high crime area. This project's shown Eric something very different.   

Felicific Calculus: Technology as a Social Marker of Race, Class, & Economics in Rochester, NY

The Greater Rochester area's payphones are part of a felicific calculus regarding the decision made to leave the payphones and the locations in which they are located. Frontier Communications were losing money from these payphones and decided to maintain them for the greater good of one of the poorest cities by the number of people under the United States' poverty level.

To many individuals, these payphones serve as a social marker or social indicator, and to others, they serve as a marker of crime. Such social markers often draw conclusions from the perception that one area is worse than another. Often these perceptions can lead to dangerous or ignorant decisions.

This perception that I witnessed firsthand drove me to educate myself on what was leading these individuals to their perceived notions of a place they had never visited before. I began to look at census maps and overlay them with maps of the payphone locations. What became apparent to me was the direct correlation between the poverty level and the payphones' location. The average income for these areas of payphones is under $20,000 per family.