Phillip Toledano photographed telephone sex operators in their own homes. Working in color, he portrayed nearly thirty of them, treating each sitter as a person with a household, a routine, and a point of view rather than as an illustration of an industry. Twin Palms Publishers issued the resulting book, Phonesex, in December 2008. It holds two registers at once: the ordinary domestic interior and the disembodied voice that callers pay to imagine. The gap between them is where the book does its thinking.

Each portrait is paired with a short text written by the operator about some aspect of the job. These personal accounts bring the subjects’ voices into the encounter, with responses that can be touching, humorous or disturbing. Read beside the images, they turn a set of photographs into a conversation about performance, money, loneliness, and the mutual agreement to keep believing a fiction. Toledano has described the transaction between operator and caller as a contract of self-delusion: the caller agrees to pretend, and the operator willingly plays the part.

The hardcover contains twenty-six four-color plates across sixty pages, at 9 by 12 inches. Photographs and first-person texts bring two different kinds of information to the reader. A portrait makes the operator visible, while a written account allows a perspective on the work to be expressed in the subject’s own words. Neither form has to be treated as the complete explanation of the other.

Phonesex can be read as an inquiry into the distance between a person and an imagined role. The contrast between domestic settings and a caller’s fantasy gives the project its starting point, but the accompanying voices complicate a simple revelation of appearances. Looking and reading together can make that contrast more personal, bringing attention to the people who participate in an exchange usually experienced only through sound.