A recent project based in the UK documents the unheralded members of the punk generation, thirty years on, through photobooth pictures. The project, called 100 Punks, draws parallels between photobooths and punk:

Never more so was this the case, than with the punk generation. Like punk, the machines were cheap, instant and easy to operate, once inside, there were no rules, perhaps the only time the subject could be in total control of the image they portrayed to the rest of the world. Each hair colour caught, new relationship captured. Self-concious, self portraits of the not so blank generation.

Check out the project online and in various galleries and museums in the coming year.

Just as the first trip across the country this summer saw a new location or two, the second trip has spawned a couple of discoveries as well. First, thanks to the Flickr ‘photobooth’ tag feed, I heard about a photobooth at Tex Tubb’s Taco Palace in Madison, Wisconsin a few months ago, and last week, had the chance to visit as we passed through town. The restaurant looks like a great place, though we didn’t have time to eat there; the photobooth is located near the passageway between the two areas of the restaurant, next to the bar and in front of the kitchen. It’s a black and white, Model 21T, and costs $3. The customized sign on the front panel of the booth reads, “Smile real perty and pin up your pic. Make your mama proud.” Customers are encouraged to place their photos on the wall of fame, underneath the 8‑track player, in the doorway.

In music video news, one night a few states ago, Aimee noticed a photobooth in the new Jessica Simpson video that was on the tv in the hotel room; the director of the video, Brett Ratner, explains why the photobooth makes an appearance.

It all started with a Google search, as most things do, these days. I was looking for more videos featuring photobooths — you know they’re out there — and I came across this post on cinematography.net from a director of photography who needed to shoot a scene for a music video in which a photobooth flash goes off, with the requirement that the flash be able to be synched to the shutter of the camera he was using to shoot the scene.

The message was posted in January, and I began looking around to see the work that the cinematographer, Tom Townend, had done. I came across what looked like a somewhat incomplete but at least recent list on the music video database, but no luck with photobooths in any of the videos listed there.

The forum thread gets a little off-topic, but Townend responded with an update later on, saying that the photobooth used for the shoot eventually became “a build in the studio (for ‘booth pov’ shot).” Now I knew at least what I was looking for, and as I tried a little more searching today, I came across Townend’s management company page, with many more samples of his (really nice) work, including videos for Doves (great song, great video by Lynne Ramsay) and Arctic Monkeys. The video for the song “New York” by Stephen Fretwell, a young singer from Scunthorpe by way of Manchester, for which Tom Townend was the director of photography with director Daniel Wolfe, ends with a series of inside-the-booth shots of Fretwell as the flash goes off. Mystery solved, and one more addition to the list of Photobooths in Music Videos.

The cover of the Arctic Monkeys’ debut album “Whatever People Say I Am, That’s What I’m Not,” currently garnering accolades and smashing sales records, seems to be an attempt at recreating a photobooth photo, if the rear curtain is any indication.

It doesn’t much look like a real photobooth photo, but that hasn’t stopped a lot of artists, designers, and ad agencies in the past. It’s yet another reason why we’ll be starting a ‘Music’ section of the site soon, with album covers and song lyrics with photobooth references. If you’ve got anything to suggest (besides Death Cab and Liz Phair and the other usual suspects), please send it our way.

Legendary blues pioneer Robert Johnson left behind very little physical evidence of his existence when he died in 1938. In addition to the 29 songs he recorded, two known photographs of him exist. One, a portrait of Johnson wearing a hat and holding his guitar, was taken at the Hooks Brothers Studio in Memphis in 1938. The other, discovered by Johnson biographer Steven LaVere in a cedar chest belonging to Johnson’s half-sister Carrie Thompson, is a photo booth portrait. 

Today, the photos are at the center of a legal quagmire that involves Thompson’s heirs, LaVere (to whom Thompson ceded rights of the photos), a man claiming to be Johnson’s son (who has been named sole heir of his estate) and the CBS label, which produced the blockbuster box set of Johnson’s recordings in 1990. Thompson’s heirs have filed suit against LaVere, Johnson’s sole heir Claud Johnson, and Sony Corporation, which bought CBS Records.

Is this the first time a photobooth photo has been at the center of a legal dispute? The case not only involves the photo itself, but gets at the mechanics of 1930s photobooth technology:

The case promises to bring questions about the images to a boil. Mr. LaVere says the miniature photo he found in the trunk is a photo-booth portrait. Ms. Anderson says her sister took it herself with a Kodak, which, if true, could make it easier for her to argue that it doesn’t belong to the Johnson estate.

Nonsense, responds Mr. LaVere, who is unwilling to surrender his copyrights. Photo booths render pictures as mirror images, he says, so that the original pictured the right-handed Mr. Johnson as a left-handed guitarist.

For the moment, that is impossible to verify. Mr. Nevas, Ms. Anderson’s lawyer, said he is “not at liberty to say” where the photographs are. When pressed, he says only: “They’re in the possession of my clients.”

As one of two extant photos of Johnson, the image has been widely distributed and interpreted, and in 1994, became the first photobooth portrait to be turned into a US postage stamp (though not the last). The cigarette that dangles from Johnson’s lips was famously removed at the order of the USPS, an interesting change that is analyzed in great detail in Patricia Schroeder’s excellent 2004 work Robert Johnson, Mythmaking, and Contempory American Culture. In order to accommodate the dimensions of the stamp, Johnson’s guitar and hand are also moved slightly, and the drapery background of the original portrait becomes a wall of shingles in stamp designer Julian Allen’s version.

The photo has been painted, re-enacted, adapted, and painted again. The photo is often cropped, usually nearly square, which causes it to lose the tell-tale look of the photobooth portrait. This colorized version of the portrait gives a good idea of its true dimensions and clipped edges. 

We’ll be waiting patiently to hear the court’s decision in the case, and see who ends up with what may be the most valuable photobooth photo of all time. 

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.