The longer we look into the world of photobooths, the more people we find doing striking, fascinating, and surprising things with the the photos these machines produce. Today, we present two artists whose work take advantage of the ubiquity, affordability, and malleability of the photobooth photo, one older Russian and one young American.
The Russian artist, Andrey Chezhin, has work featured in a new exhibition called “Tools As Art: The Hechinger Collection,” opening April 27 at the San Francisco Museum of Craft and Design. A preview in the San Jose Mercury-news describes the show, and mentions Chezhin’s work:
Russian artist Andrey Chezhin used discarded photo booth head shots, replacing facial features with hardware, as a political statement about the loss of individual identity.
Read our artist page for Chezhin, a small Andrey Chezhin biography and C.V., and look at some of his other work.
We were also contacted this week by Daniel Minnick, much of whose work features photostrips and individual photobooth photos, sometimes simply by themselves and also heavily altered with added lines, colors, and shapes.
Minnick is a graduate of the San Francisco Art Institute, and has been featured in solo and group shows around California.
A look around Minnick’s online gallery is well worth the time; click on each individual photo or strip to see a series of related works featuring photobooth photos. They range from simple self-portraits to complex series, and exploit the versatility of the black and white photobooth in interesting ways.