I haven’t seen it yet with my own eyes, but various friends and family have alerted me to the presence of photobooth pictures for each of the models in the latest Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue. Unfortunately, there is no evidence of the pictures on the SI website.
In related news, the February 14, 2005 issue of SI (p 35) displays a page of Pro Bowler headshots purportedly taken in a photobooth. However, they don’t look like pics from an authentic booth to me. My guess is the photographer (Tim Mantoani) set up some sort of makeshift booth with a digital camera and hung a curtain behind the players.
Sports Illustrated can’t get enough of the photobooth.
Last night at the AMC Fenway Theater, we hit the photobooth trifecta. First, as we walked up the stairs to get tickets, we saw a giant banner for the film The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants (?), featuring a photobooth strip sticking out of someone’s massive back pocket. Second, after we bought our tickets and were on the way to the theater, a poster for A Lot Like Love that Aimee spotted, using four photobooth pictures as the poster image. And finally, ten minutes into Hitch a couple goes on a date and — what else? — spends some time in a photobooth, which we see from inside and out in a ten-second sequence. It’s getting big, people. Posters pictured here, and screencaps from Hitch will follow when it arrives on dvd.
Stuff (New Zealand) reports on the debut novel by television writer David Wolstencraft this week. The creator of the popular show “Spooks” (known as “MI‑5″ in the U.S.) has written a novel about — what else — espionage, titled Good News, Bad News. The story apparently centers on two agents, who are ordered, “apparently by bureaucratic error, to work together in the same photo booth in a London Underground station.” Now, I assume the writer means one of the hundreds of photobooths foundin Tube stations all over London, but what kind of work are two people going to do inside a photobooth? Guess I’ll have to read to novel.
Last week, another photobooth was sold at auction on eBay, this time for the sum of $1691.66. Before being sold, the photobooth was located P. O. Pears restaurant in Lincoln, Nebraska.
The description of the booth seems to make more of a deal about the item being from the “World Famous P. O. Pears” (which, according to their website, is a “Good Food & Good Time Saloon. A Lincoln landmark that has stood like a guardian over the intersection of 9th & M Streets since 1980. That’s two and a half decades of Burgers & Beer”), rather than the fact that it’s an old photobooth. It’s described as an “Auto-Photo Studio Model 14,” with serial #4320. I feel like photobooths are slowly making their way from five-and-dimes and restaurants in the Midwest to hip bars in Williamsburg and San Francisco. I wonder where this one will end up.
A New York Times article titled ‘Urban Studies: Where the Kids Are, and Were’ describes the arcade on Mott Street in Chinatown, and mentions the existence of the photobooth there. Having just returned from a trip to the City, the timing is a little frustrating — I’d always assumed the booth had disappeared — but I’ll add it to the list for the next time around.
TransformOnline’s Daily Blog chose the Photobooth Directory, whose days are numbered at Doubleperf.com now that Photobooth.net is getting its sea legs, as a pick of the day in their Culture section. Add that to the star turn on NYC cable in December and the slew of recent photobooth contributions I’ve received from New York, North Carolina, and Seattle in the last two months, and I’d call it the beginnings of something. We’re not at critical mass yet, but hey, people are paying attention, and more people will pay even more attention with a legit domain name, courtesy of Tim. Now, if I can just remember to keep using “photobooth” instead of “photo booth,” I think I’ll be all set.
If you find yourself in Edinburgh in the next few months, head over to the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art for the
Andy Warhol Self-Portraits exhibition, which opened this week. A review of the show in the Herald gives an overview of the pieces in the exhibit, which include Warhol’s famous photobooth self-portraits.
…[I]t is when he comes into contact with a real machine — the photobooth — that his self-portraits truly take off. The photobooth was Warhol’s studio as much as the Factory. In 1963 he made his first key series of silkscreens on canvas using photobooth pictures as a source. Warhol comes across like some composite portrait of an unholy triumvirate of criminal, celebrity and saint, dressed in overcoat, sunglasses, shirt and tie. Mugshot, publicity shot or studied portrait? The images are all three.
The exhibition closes May 2.
Another article on the exhibition, from Scotland on Sunday, mentions Warhol’s “early works and the original photo-booth snapshots on which they were based.”
Inspired by conceptual artist Pierre Bismuth’s nomination, alongside Charlie Kaufman and Michel Gondry, for an Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay for their work on Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Artforum Magazine this week took a brief look at “Conceptual Art at the Oscars.”
While Bismuth’s work behind the scenes of the film has received recognition, the article points out that is has not always been so. Der Fotomatonreparateur (The photobooth repairman) by German art collective Die Tödliche Doris, is given as an example of an instance in which conceptual art has likely inspired a film (in this case, Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s Amélie), but has not been recognized.
Der Fotomatonreparateur…which was first shown at the 1982 Paris Biennial, includes a collection of torn-up photographs made by a repairman who abandons his test images–a central storyline in Amélie.
See the Photobooths in Movies and TV entries for Eternal Sunshine and Amélie. Also check out more examples of photobooths in art.
A Sunday New York Times article titled “A Night Out With: The Kills: The Power of 2” details the the band’s night in New York. As the article states, “At 7B, they crowded into a photo booth. Poses were struck, pictures were taken and drinks were ordered. The booth spit out a strip of stylish black-and-white portraits that looked as if they had been snapped in 1967.”
See the directory profile for the 7B photobooth.
The Photobooth.net Photobooth Blog is officially launched today. The goal of the blog is to bring to light examples of photobooths in the news, on television, and in film, as well as to highlight art projects and other works on the internet and around the world that employ photobooths. Finally, the blog will be a forum for announcements about Photobooth.net itself, including new features, interesting developments, and other milestones. It will be administered by Tim and Brians, with other contributors added down the line. Welcome!
