A few weeks ago, Tim and I were, by chance, both in New York City at the same time and were lucky enough to enjoy a look around the Museum of Modern Art’s exhibition of new photography acquisitions with Leslie Ureña and Lee Ann Daffner of the museum’s photography department.

As we walked through the galleries, we headed directly for the reason we were there: a case containing forty-four Photomatic photographs of a woman, taken over a relatively brief span of time.



The photographs are remarkably unvaried: no one else, save a tiny sliver of a child’s arm and head in one photo, ever shares the frame with the woman. The frames are both metal and paper, with a few varieties of each type represented, and the photos are, for the most part, in good shape.



I’m curious to see if any of the photos feature interesting markings on the back, but that will have to wait until the exhibition is taken down. The photos are great to see up close, and the rest of the show, including a terrific batch of photos by Richard Avedon, is open through March, 2010, and is well worth seeing.

We’re grateful to Leslie, Lee Ann, and Sarah Meister, as well, for setting up our little meeting. We’re always encouraged when we see photobooth photos in a museum setting, and to see their significance and their narrative power taken seriously in the grand scheme of the history of photography.

Today we’ve got another in the sporadic series of photobooth-related nuggets we’ve come across on eBay. This set of seven photos, with one tantalizingly missing from the full complement of eight advertised on the envelope, show a striking young woman dressed in a fur collared coat and pearls. We see her smiling, unsmiling, looking to the right, looking to the left, and so on; what was in the final photo, and who ended up with it? Maybe she used it for a commutation ticket.

We received an email with photos from a couple named Peter and Ina in the Netherlands a few weeks ago, and it’s taken me this long just to recover from the shock of seeing their gorgeous photobooth in all its original glory. This gem may be the best-looking booth I’ve ever seen.



Thanks to Peter and Ina for sharing the booth, just one item in their amazing collection of games, jukeboxes, and other machines. Here’s Ina’s account of how they came across it:

About twelve years ago, when I saw this thing for the first time, it was love at first sight for me. The photobooth was in a jukebox store in Amstelveen in the Netherlands, and I had never seen something like it before. Unfortunately, my husband didn’t see in it what I saw, so in spite of all the hints I gave him over the years, the booth stayed where it was: in the jukebox store.

The asking price was rather high and this booth also takes a lot of space, so there weren’t many people seriously interested and the guys who owned the photobooth didn’t sell it. 

Because the owners wanted to quit their business, they put a lot of stuff on sale, and that’s why, after all those years, I was delighted to get it as a Christmas present last Christmas. And above all…for a more than reasonable price.

My husband made me really glad and believe it or not, by now he almost likes it more than I do. The condition of the booth is rather great so we don’t have to restore it and as far as we can see, the mechanisms also work well. Now we are trying to find out what chemicals we need to actually make it work again and I think, with the hope of a couple of handy friends, this will work out.

We’ll post any news we get on the progress of the booth as it comes in.

Happy to find a photobooth-related event in Southern California, I ventured to the Santa Monica Airport this afternoon, armed with a stack of Photobooth.net postcards, to attend the second annual Vernacular Photography Fair, which we noted here a few days ago. The event, held in a gallery space at the Santa Monica Art Studios, consisted of ten dealers from around the country who specialize in “found photography, anonymous imagery or snapshot photography,” as well as hundreds of photography enthusiasts browsing, buying, and talking photos.

I was happy to make the acquaintance of Babbette Hines, whose book Photobooth was one of the inspirations that helped launch this site more than four years ago. We had a nice conversation about the joys of photobooth photos, and commiserated about the recent upswing in prices that have made collecting them less affordable than it used to be.

I also enjoyed meeting a number of other folks, including dealers Myles Haselhorst of Ampersand Vintage in Portland, Leonard Lightfoot of Vernacular Visions, John Nichols of the Santa Paula Snapshot Museum, as well as the folks who put together the event. I’m hoping Photobooth.net can be more involved next time; I could see a lot of interesting ways to collaborate. Two years after moving here, it’s great to finally get a little more involved in the vintage photography scene. Thanks to everyone at D3 Projects for putting this together.

We’ve posted images from the 1929 Harold Lloyd comedy Welcome Danger, which, along with Lonesome (noted here last month), is one of the earliest films we’ve found yet that features a photobooth. In Welcome Danger, the machine is more of an automatic photo machine without the booth, but the principle is the same, and once again, the photo taken by the machine plays an integral part in the plot of the film.



When a photo taken by Billie (Barbara Kent, who also played Mary in Lonesome) fails to come out of the machine, she walks away. A moment later, Harold (Harold Lloyd) approaches the machine, sits for his photo, and once it has arrived, places it on the drying stand for a moment. After replacing his hat, he looks at the photo and finds that it is a sort of movie fantasy double exposure, with his and Billie’s images neatly superimposed next to one another. He becomes smitten with the girl in his photo, and, as the stills from the film show, he eventually tracks her down.



We now have films featuring photobooths from every decade of the photobooth’s history, the 1920s to the present, missing only one: the 1930s. I’m hoping some eagle-eyed fans of ’30s musicals are keeping their eyes peeled for photobooth appearances. if you spot something please let us know.

The Baltimore Sun features a story today about two unlikely friends who met as rookies at the Baltimore Colts training camp in 1955: Raymond Berry, who would win Super Bowls with the Colts and later coach the Patriots to one in 1985, and Leroy Vaughn, who would leave football after a season and become best known as the father of a baseball MVP, Mo Vaughn. They reconnected after 50 years when Berry rediscovered the photo in his belongings. They had taken the photo during their rookie year in the league.

Back then, racism was still rampant in America. Had the picture been taken in the deep South — had a white man and a black man entered a coin-operated photo booth, shared the single stool and closed the curtain — there would have been hell to pay.

But it was during a road trip to Chicago or New York that two first-year players stepped into a Woolworth’s, spent a quarter and forged their friendship on a wallet-sized keepsake.

The photograph featured in the article is definitely a Photomatic, looking at its tell-tale frame, with Berry appearing slightly out of focus for sitting too close to the lens. It’s a great, evocative photo, even if we had no idea who the men were or what their story was.

Last year, when Berry finally tracked him down, Vaughn was stunned to hear his voice.

I was tickled to death to get the call,” Vaughn said from his home in Virginia. “We’re going to get together [soon] this summer, to sit around and reminisce.”

Berry, for one, can’t wait.

“It’s been a long, long time,” he said. “I think we’ll probably laugh a lot.”

Surely they will record their friendship again.

Said Vaughn: “We’ll find one of those old photo booths and have another picture taken — 53 years later.”

Well, gentlemen, you know where to come to find your nearest “old photo booth” location, so good luck!

Photomatic photo, Raymond Berry and baltimoresun.com

We’re ending Book Week with an oldie but a goodie, the catalog for the ground-breaking group show called “Photomaton: A Contemporary Survey of Photobooth Art,” which took place at the Pyramid Arts Center in Rochester, New York more than twenty years ago, in the winter of 1987–88. The catalog has been somewhat hard to come by, and copies show up on eBay on average maybe once a year in the four years we’ve been paying attention, usually running around $100 a copy. I managed to pick up a copy for about twenty bucks in August, just in time to bring everyone a closer look at it.

Having not seen one of these catalogs before, the first thing that struck me about it was its size; it’s not a full-size 8.5″ x 11″ publication; it’s more like 7″ x 8.5″, no taller than it needs to be to fit one scale photostrip vertically on the page. Featuring work on the front cover by Herman Costa and on the back cover by Jef Aerosol, the catalog samples the work of thirteen photobooth artists, with images and biographies of each artist.

Curator and artist Bern Boyle wrote a preface to the catalog in which he explains the exhibition.

This exhibit was designed as an overview, and does not include all photobooth artists, or all of the photobooth works of the exhibiting artists. But it is quite a beginning, and in addition to calling attention to the artists whose works are shown here, it should encourage other exhibits and stimulate historical research.

Indeed, it was quite a beginning, and the intervening years have seen many photobooth-related exhibitions and, as we’ve seen this week, much historical research.

The catalog continues with a brief essay titled “Photobooth History and Development,” also by Boyle, which begins with the history of coin-operated vending machines and passes through Mathew Steffens, “Monsieur Enjalbert,” and Anatol Josepho, all familiar names in the development of the technology. Boyle mentions Warhol’s role in using the photobooth in the creation of art, and continues by discussing the techniques and interests of each of the artists in the show.



The show came at a time when photobooths seemed to be on the wane, but before the digital revolution that would be their most serious threat. Boyle writes

There are still streamlined, curved photobooths around producing strips of four black and white pictures, but many machines are being converted to color or abandoned for the square-format color machines. We now have machines that will videotape you and your friends and machines that will give you a roll of 35mm film ready to process, instead of the traditional photos!

Each artist is given a page that includes a sample self-portrait photostrip, their birth date and place of residence, as well as an artist’s statement. Sample work from selected artists is featured next, followed by a selected bibliography.

We hope you’ve enjoyed Book Week; here’s a link to all of the entries in case you missed any. I started it a little haphazardly and had only planned to write about two or three books, but when I looked around, I realized there were more works out there that I hadn’t given proper attention to, enough to flesh out a full seven days’ worth of posts. Please let us know what you think of the books if you pick up copies for yourselves, and we’d appreciate any tips on more works not in our Photobooths In Print section.

As we near the end of Book Week, we’re taking a look at another excellent recent photobooth book from Europe, Irene Stutz’s Das Einfränklerimperium. We covered the book when it was released in December of last year, but it deserves another look now that we have a copy (thanks again to Irene and Tobias for getting the book across the ocean to me).

The book, which originated from Stutz’s thesis project for a visual communications degree from Zurich University of the Arts, tells the history of Schnellphoto AG, the Swiss photobooth company that ran photobooths around the country for more than four decades.

Through essays, photographs, and interviews, Stutz tells the story of Christoph and Martin Balke, the brothers who ran Schnellphoto, from the 1960s until 2007, when the photochemical booths were phased out. Not only is the book a comprehensive history of the company, and of a nation’s relationship with its photobooths, but it contains a stunning series of mostly black-and-white photographs of not only the photobooths themselves, but of everything that made up the world of the photobooths: offices, manuals, equipment, spare parts, maps, charts, letters, and files. Stutz comprehensively documents the world of equipment, paper, and machinery that helped Schnellphoto design, manage, repair, and market the photobooths.

If you are interested in learning about how a photobooth works, and want to learn about the dying art of running a photobooth business, this book is a must, and Stutz’s photos are not only technically and historically illuminating, but they are beautiful portraits in their own right.



The book also includes hundreds of photobooth photos, most in that uniquely Swiss horizontal orientation, as well as advertisements, newspaper articles, cartoons, and other ephemera related to the booths. My German is a little better than my Italian, so the text is a little more comprehensible than in some of the other works I’ve profiled this week, and they are fascinating, on everything from the components of the company — the factory, the patent, the machinery, the paper, and chemicals that combine to make a photobooth — to the role of the photobooth in creating friendships, and the place of the photobooth in the digital world.



The book is widely available online, and is well worth seeking out. It is a testament to Stutz’s devotion to these booths, and to her talent as a photographer and writer, and will stand as the definitive story of photobooths in Switzerland. Let’s hope enthusiasts in other countries are inspired to create similar histories of their own.

Visit the website for the book for more information.

As Book Week continues, we bring you another invaluable work from Italy, Professor Federica Muzzarelli’s 2003 work, Formato tessera: Storia, arte e idee in photomatic. Muzzarelli, who is a professor of the History of Photography at the University of Bologna, has written a book that covers the story of photobooths from all angles: the history of portrait photography, the role of the photobooth in the creation of art, the photobooth’s place in popular culture, and the digital future of photobooths, among many other topics.



Without fluent Italian skills, our understanding of the book is naturally less than complete, but a rough translation of the chapter headings, a perusal of the plentiful and wide-ranging sources cited in footnotes, and a glance at the excellent illustrations — from early carte de visites to Marcello Mastroianni, from Duchamp to Benetton ads — make it clear that Muzzarelli’s work is the most rigorous academic survey of the history and significance of the photobooth that we have yet seen.



We hope the book will eventually receive an English translation; until then, it is available for purchase through a variety of online retailers. Thanks to Professor Muzzarelli for her work on this excellent resource, and for getting in touch with us here to share Formato tessera with us.

Covering the world of photobooths as we do from our home base in the United States, it’s often difficult for us to gauge the impact and explore the history of photobooths in other countries. We know about the present-day fotoautomaten around Germany, and about the demise of photochemical booths in Switzerland, and the interesting booths we’ve learned about in places like Helsinki and Kiev, but we don’t have a tangible sense of the depth of influence that the photobooth has had in many places outside our own sphere.

Over the years, though, thanks to enthusiasts and scholars around the world, we’ve been able to learn more about the role of the photobooth internationally. The importance of the photobooth in Italian arts and history in particular has become increasingly clear, and though it seems nearly all photochemical booths have been wiped off the Italian map, we have ample evidence of their historical significance.

Today, we present the first of two Italian photobooth books we’ve learned of recently: Photomatic e altre storie, a collection of works by the photographer Franco Vaccari, with accompanying essays by art historians and critics. I’d first like to thank Marco for letting us know about this book and for sending us a copy as part of an international photobooth book exchange — who knows how long it would have taken us to come across it without Marco’s help.

Franco Vaccari, a photographer who has been exhibiting work in Italy and around the world for more than 40 years, is best known for his “Exhibitions in Real Time,” primarily the piece he exhibited at the Venice Biennale in 1972, “Leave a photographic trace of your passage on these walls.” Visitors to the exhibition found a photobooth in the middle of a room, and were encouraged to take a photostrip and hang it on the wall.

Vaccari also collected submissions of photostrips from ordinary Italians, taken in 700 photobooths all over the country, some of which are collected in the book.



One of the most appealing elements of the book for us is the series of portraits of the photobooths themselves, looking timeless but also very much of their era, in train stations, city centers, and along the side of the road.



If you’re interested in the international history of photobooths, and in the investigations into individuality and identity that Vaccari undertakes, we highly recommend picking up this book, which seems to be available from a number of European booksellers, as well as the publisher.