We are very excited to announce that the 2014 International Photobooth Convention will be held at A&A Studios Chicago, June 6–8, 2014. Organized by our longtime friend and collaborator (and designer of the convention announcement) Meags Fitzgerald, yours truly Tim and Brian, and Anthony Vizzari of A&A Studios and host of the 2009 Convention in Chicago, the event will bring together photobooth enthusiasts, artists, experts, and the generally curious for a weekend of experimentation, collaborative projects, talks, screenings, and a book launch. 

Visit the convention page and RSVP for the event on Facebook.

More details to come in 2014. We look forward to seeing you all there!

We have a few updates today as we head into fall. Thanks to Brad for letting us know about his Model 14, rescued from near-death in Wisconsin and restored by Brad with help from Anthony at A&A Studios Chicago, now up and running at The Junction Diner in Forest Park.

Thanks to our Canadian correspondent Meags Fitzgerald for another update from our northern neighbors. First, two booths we haven’t had listed before in Montréal: first, at Korova Bar, a color machine with a customized cabinet.

And second, another one of the many booths in the Montréal Metro, this one at the Sherbrooke Metro station.

Secondly, we have some belated news about Meags’ stop-motion photobooth short film, LaCuna, which screened last week at the Edmonton Film Festival, and won! Congratulations to Meags for her film being named Best Animated Short film. 

I apologize for being late to the game on this momentous news; if I had my way, I’d be live-tweeting and up-to-the-minute blogging on all sorts of photobooth news, all day long, but it’s been a busy summer and fall, and it seems like keeping up with the news was the first casualty. I have to say, though, as things begin to calm down during winter, we have a lot of interesting stuff coming up, and 2014 promises to be another big year on the photobooth front.

Thanks to Tim Mantoani, a photographer in San Diego who owns a lovely Model 9 photobooth which we visited in 2008, for letting us know about his newest venture, Snap Apparel. This photography-themed clothing shop includes a shirt featuring his booth, so if you can’t visit the machine, you can at least carry a picture of it around with you. 

Thanks also to Les Matons for another gem of a find, an extended sequence in a photobooth from a 1982 film starring one of my favorite French actors, Lino Ventura, called Espion, lève toi.

Check out more stills from this sequence in a Swiss Prontophot booth in our Movies section. Keep your contributions coming, everyone!

The long (and long-awaited) renaissance of the photochemical booth in Europe continues with new booths in Manchester, England and Florence, Italy. Thanks to Paul at Fred Aldous and Matteo with Fotoautomatica for keeping us updated on their latest additions.

The new color photobooth at Fred Aldous joins their lovely black and white machine, which they installed last year. It’s great to see a full complement of black and white and color booths in the north of England. With these booths in Manchester and London covered as well, plus a booth in Dublin, we just need some booths in Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland to round out the Isles.

Fotoautomatica adds to their stable of black and white machines in Florence with a new machine on Via del Proconsolo (pictured at right). We’re excited to see the proliferation of machines in Italy, and we can make a Photobooth.net pilgrimage to visit them some day.

Lou Southgate sent us an update on a project she’s been working on lately, a public photobooth project inspired by the work of photobooth pioneer Franco Vaccari.

After Franco Vaccari, 2013 was produced live at my graduation show last month as a homage to the great Franco Vaccari. With my work responding to amateur practices in photography, the work has always been an interest of mine and it was an amazing experience to make! My audience were invited to place their strip on the gallery wall and this took place across 4 days. The work wouldn’t have been possible without the loan and sponsor of an analogue photobooth by Stuart at Retro-me. Stuart and his team were absolutely amazing throughout the install and take down of the exhibition.

All the strips from the exhibition are currently being scanned and will be put on my website over the next few weeks. Further to this, I have started to curate sets from the strips for a future exhibition on Warren Street, London which opens on the 17th of July 2013.

Thanks to Lou for keeping us updated on her work. 

We have a brief note today about two exhibitions in Europe that feature the photobooth in one way or another. Thanks to Ole and Les Matons for letting us know about the shows. 

First, at the Vögele Kultur Zentrum in Pfäffikon, Switzerland, is a show entitled “Verantwortung: Zum Temperament einer Haltung,” on now through September 22. The J’adore aglisia photobooth project is part of the show. The project, which we covered back in 2009, is a collaboration between RAFAA and Ole Krestchmann.

Not so far away in Vichy, France, Instantanés ordinaries have put on an exhibition of photobooth portraits, on view now through September 1. We’d love to hear from readers who’ve made it to either show to hear more about what they were like. Thanks again to everyone who let us know about these events.

Apologies all around for the recent dormant spell here on the blog. My photobooth focus lately has been on figuring out how to get my own Model 14 photobooth out of the shed and across the country, rather than the larger photobooth world. During the last month, I’ve finished working at my job in Los Angeles and will be heading to Connecticut to start a new job. Photobooth.net West will become Photobooth.net East again, just as I was when this site started almost ten years ago. 

I have a few little additions that have arrived in the last few months to present today, but I haven’t sought out much news, and will continue to be occupied with other things over the next month or so. Needless to say, after a perhaps slightly fallow year for the site in 2013, it looks like 2014 is going to be another busy one here at Photobooth.net. Stay tuned, and we’ll keep you posted.

First, our friend Scot at the Massilon Museum in Ohio sent us a short promo video for their upcoming Warhol exhibition, complete with their lovely black and white photobooth for museum goers to take photos in. 

Next, thanks to Tony for sending us an account of his Portland Photobooth Hunt. It was great to read about his travels around Portland, searching for and using photobooths, using our site as a guide. It reminded me of my Chicago Photobooth Marathon a few years back, though his was a good deal more successful than mine. 

Thanks to Marco for sending in photos from a new photobooth location, the Hoxton Hotel in London. The booth, an Auto-Photo Canada machine, looks right at home. We appreciate the excellent sample photo Marco sent, as well. Slowly but surely, London is returning to the map in terms of photochemical machines, which we’re very happy to see. And speaking of London booths, Time Out London published a guide to black and white photobooths in London. Thanks to Sophie for the tip.

We also heard from our friend Jan Wenzel recently, who let us know about his new solo show at the Klaus Kleinschmidt Gallery in Wiesbaden, Germany. These new pieces were created in a black and white booth, which is a bit of a departure for Jan.

Jan’s show is currently open, and will run through September 20. If anyone goes to see it, we’d love to hear what you think.

Tynjanow | Zwölf Porträts (2012) 8 Automatenstreifen
Diptychon als Unikat (Schwarzweiß)
je 42,0 x 62,0 cm (Rahmen)
Verso Signet + Stempel

It’s been awhile since we’ve had a chance to post news on the blog here, but that doesn’t mean the site has been dormant. On the contrary, we’ve had additions to the site in almost every category over the last few weeks. We’ll take a look at new locations, movies, TV shows, newspaper articles, and album covers today.

First, a bit of history: 

In a February 1970 Los Angeles Times interview with singer-songwriter Jimmy Webb, the author describes Webb’s upcoming album this way:

…[A]nother current project is a new album, with Webb compositions sung entirely by Webb. Jim’s been working on the recording for about six months: he has daily sessions—morning and afternoon, often breaks for dinner and returns to work into the small hours. The LP will be called ‘Confessions in a Photo Booth,’ but he’ll introduce the new material, all of it, in his concert debut on Saturday at the Music Center.

In an August 1970 Billboard column (see it here on Google Books), the album is named as his first on Reprise. By the time it was released, “Confessions in a Photo Booth” had become “Words and Music,” so the world was robbed of what could have been a prominent photobooth-titled album.

Continuing in the world of music, Callan Furlong wrote to let us know that his EP The Fool I Was Before features photostrips on the cover.

And finally, while browsing the aisles at Amoeba Music in Hollywood, I spotted this recent CD from The Living Sisters:

We have a few new locations to mention, the first not too far from (my) home, at Dexter’s Camera in Ventura, California, where Photo-Me installed a black and white booth this week. Thanks to Matt and Raul for letting us know about the booth.

The second is slightly further afield, in Riga, Latvia, where Kate Tyler found a color machine, one of the only original booths still active in Europe. Time for a road trip to Riga! Please keep your contributions coming.

Next, we’ll move on to television, where the photobooth continues to be a mainstay of current shows: this time, reality juggernaut “The Bachelor” took a turn in the booth. During Week 7 of the most recent series, the Bachelor and one of his ladies visited the photobooth at Orange Dracula in Seattle, and took some photos.

Looking back a few decades, Les Matons clued us into a 1960s French TV show, La Caméra Invisible, that featured a photobooth in an episode:

We were excited to read a nice newspaper piece on our buddy Anthony Vizzari and his company, A & A Studios, this past weekend. The original article in the Chicago Grid is here, and we’ve got it archived here, as well. Congratulations, Anthony and all the crew at A & A.

We’ve also added a few new movies to roster. Last year’s Academy Award-winner in the Documentary Feature category, Undefeated, features a photobooth shot of a young Bill Courtney, who would grow up to be the coach at the center of this story.

Going a little further back, we have a few more passing photobooth shots in the animated short The Moon and the Son: An Imagined Conversation, as well as in the 1984 West German film Wundkanal.

Finally, a French film about a woman obsessed with the photobooth who ends up meeting the photobooth repairman… Sound familiar? Well, it’s not Amélie. It’s Lucille et le Photomaton, a 1993 short by Sébastien Nuzzo that we’ve long been meaning to add to the site.

I’ve been keeping my eyes peeled for photobooths in cinema for ten years now, and most sequences I’ve come across focus on the photobooth, or at least feature the booth prominently. Carnival of Souls is a film of a different sort, in many ways. It’s a terrifically moody, evocative, singular film (check out the excellent Criterion release on DVD), and for our interest, wins the award for most oblique, obscure photobooth appearance in a film. In one brief shot that lasts just a few seconds, one edge of the end of a photobooth can be seen behind a Williams Titan shooting game. I thought I spotted something when I saw the film screened, and confirmed my suspicions with the DVD.

From the sign on the end of the booth that reads “Take your own miniature portraits / Photos in 2 1/2 minutes,” the “N” of “OWN,” the “S” of “PORTRAITS,” and the “S” of “MINUTES” are barely visible. If you look even more closely, you can see the drying slot at the right edge of the booth.

Paul Fejos’ 1928 (mostly) silent masterpiece Lonesome is an important film in the history of American cinema, but it’s downright seminal in the story of the photobooth, as it has the earliest known example of a photobooth appearing in a film. Thanks to a new Criterion Blu-ray release, we can upgrade the images on the site. Roll over the new image to see the improvement from the old: better image quality, more detail, and the correct aspect ratio.