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THE PHOTOBOOTH BLOG

Archives: History

June 10, 2010

Last night saw the opening of an exhibition at the Fleming Museum at the University of Vermont called Picture Yourself: The Photobooth in America, 1926-2010. Nakki Goranin, author of American Photobooth, organized the show, and told us a little about what can be found there. The exhibit includes

…my working Auto-Photo 14 and my wooden 1934 handmade photobooth plus parts of a street photographer’s photobooth (circa 1930s)… Many vintage photos from my collections, an original handbook written by Anatol Josepho, one of his original lenses, etc.

We look forward to seeing photos from the event and hearing about how it went.

Brian | 7:29 PM |

During the 2009 International Photobooth Convention, we screened a short documentary that takes the viewer on a 3-minute tour inside a photobooth as a photostrip is being developed. If you have ever wondered what is humming and whirring while you wait for your photo, wonder no more: we finally got around to uploading the short to YouTube. The video is in real-time, so you can see what happens at each stage of the development process. The video might have benefited from a musical score of some sort (a la Sesame Street), but opted instead for the natural sounds of the booth’s inner-dialogue.

Tim | 3:29 PM |

May 21, 2010

Photobooths feature prominently the Seattle Art Museum’s new exhibition on the work of Andy Warhol titled “love fear pleasure lust pain glamour death—Andy Warhol Media Works.”

From the museum’s press release:

The exhibition begins with a group of Warhol’s photobooth strip portraits. These strips of images shot form an ordinary photobooth highlight the flux in personality of the artist’s subjects. Unlike a single-frame portrait, the photobooth strips capture change in movement and facial expressions throughout a series of connected images, revealing the sitter’s personality and creating a story of shifting moods or actions. For instance, in Edie Sedgwick (1965), the Factory superstar who Andy Warhol once said “could be anything you wanted her to be” strikes a series of coyly crafted poses that convey multiple moods, if not multiple identities. The photobooth strips on view in love fear pleasure lust pain glamour death include portraits of celebrities such as Ethel Scull and Gerard Malanga, as well as self-portraits by Warhol in which the artist explores his own personality shifts through a storyline of snapshots.

In addition to these works by Warhol, the museum has installed a photochemical booth for visitors to enjoy. Museumgoers are encouraged to take a strip of photos, cut off one photo, and leave it on the museum wall.

A Facebook page features photos of the wall of visitors’ photobooth pictures.

For a little more on the show, take a look at a Seattle Times review of the show and an article from The Spectator showing some visitors’ photos.

“Andy Warhol Photo Wall” from Seattle Art Museum on Facebook

Brian | 8:45 AM |

May 2, 2010

It’s hard to believe it’s been five years since we officially launched Photobooth.net, but the calendar doesn’t lie. It’s been an enjoyable and interesting five years, and today we’ll take a look back and see what has happened since we began.

About three months prior to the launch of the blog, in January, 2005, Tim contacted me, introduced himself, and asked about collaborating on a photobooth website, having seen a small collection of photobooth locations I had posted on my own site beginning in 2003. By the next month, we were up and running, collecting and presenting photobooth locations around the world, listing the films and TV shows that featured photobooths, and starting a catalog of artists, projects, and articles centered on photochemical photobooths.

As of February 2005, when we began putting the website together and the pre-cursor to the site was still on my old personal page, here’s what we had:

• 50 booth locations (48 in 14 states, 2 in the UK)
• 31 Movies
• 8 TV shows
• 4 Commercials
• 1 Music Video

Take a look through those sections to see how we’ve grown over the years; counting booths that have come and gone since we listed them, we now have more than 350 photobooth locations listed, in a dozen countries around the world.

While the site had its origins in my attempt to visit every photobooth I could, our growth is due in large part to the generous contributions of photobooth fans around the world who have tipped us off, clued us in, and emailed photographs, scans, and information about booths we wouldn’t otherwise get to.

The same is true with the movies and TV shows we list; we now have more 100 movies listed and nearly as many TV shows, with more popping up every month.

Over the years, we’ve documented the two International Photobooth Conventions that have happened in the U.S. since we began, in 2005 in St Louis and 2009 in Chicago. In addition to being great events, these were opportunities to meet photobooth enthusiasts from around the world who have since become friends, including Anthony, Mixup, Danny, Nakki, Siobhan, Carole, Connie, Dina, and others.

The site has also been a way to communicate and collaborate with people we haven’t yet had the pleasure of meeting, but hope to one day, including Klaas, Martin, Ira, Marco, Ole, Meags, and Igor.

Looking back, it’s as though we created the site in the knowledge that everything was about to change. I don’t think that’s true, but the photobooth world was a different place in 2005. Photochemical booths could still be found at amusement parks around the country, they weren’t as ubiquitous in bars as they are today, and digital photobooths weren’t a wedding and party juggernaut like they are now.

And for a site that culls most of its information from the internet, it’s tough to overstate the effect that Apple’s “Photo Booth” application has had on the online world of photobooths over the last five years. The program, which was introduced in October of 2005, has now polluted every corner of the web, from Google Alerts, which are now only rarely reference actual photobooths, to the Flickr feed for photos tagged “photobooth.” The feed used to be a great source of information on new photobooth locations, as well as interesting vintage photobooth photos. For the last few years, though, it has become a dumping ground for kids to put up photos from the Apple Store, and a free way for digital photobooth companies to distribute their photos.

The last five years have brought a host of positive changes, as well. When we began our site, the last photochemical booths were being replaced with digital machines all across Europe. From the UK to Switzerland, Italy to Germany, the photochemical photobooth was a thing of the past. But slowly, bit by bit, in Berlin and Hamburg, Paris and London, Zurich and Moscow, we’ve watched the booths return. While the machines seem to be disappearing at an alarming rate in the United States, we’re heartened to see the great work done by the entrepreneurs, artists, and technicians (sometimes all the same person) to keep the booth alive in Europe.

Since the site began, we’ve added a section on Music and revamped our location listings to make them easier to navigate. You may also have noticed that our discussion board, once a thriving place to ask questions and share ideas (and then a cesspool of spam comments), is no longer active. We are in the process of restarting the board, and hope to have it up again soon, alongside a new section on the history of the booth, an improved gallery to share your photostrips, and a place to share technical manuals and instructions for operating and repairing photobooths.

We’re grateful to everyone who has contributed to the site over the last five years, as well as to those who have written in simply to tell us how much they’ve enjoyed it or found it useful. Thanks for reading, contributing, and helping keep the photobooth alive!

Brian | 9:33 AM |

April 20, 2010

We’ve recently come across an issue of Time magazine from January 1965, featuring a cover by Andy Warhol, using photostrips of teenagers to illustrate a story on the subject in the issue. From Publisher Bernhard M. Auer’s letter:

The cover illustration was done by Pop Artist Andy Warhol, who has made his name and fame by getting his literal renditions of Campbell Soup cans into leading art galleries. Warhol, 33, worked in a five-and-ten as a kid in McKeesport, Pa. For this week’s cover, he took seven youngsters—aged 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18 and 19, and all relatives of TIME staffers—to a Broadway arcade, where they posed for pictures in one of these old five-and-ten type camera booths. These pictures were Warhol’s starting point for the cover illustration. We asked him to use the same techniques for the accompanying “self-portrait.”

In the following issue, readers responded to the article, and to Warhol’s art. Here are two such letters:

Sir: Andy Warhol’s cover illustration portrays the antics of monkeys in a sideshow. One might infer that today’s teenagers make a joke of the responsibility inherent in their premature sophistication.

D. R. HUNNEMAN III, New Haven, Conn.

Sir: Your Andy Warhol cover is evocative and refreshing. The squares, unfortunately, won’t pay attention to how he’s manipulated his patterns, and thus will miss the rhythm and wit.

R. C. JONES, New York City

Brian | 9:54 PM |

April 19, 2010

Our friend Mixup has sent in this note about the late photobooth artist Jaroslav Supek.

Multimedia artist and writer Jaroslav Supek died after a short illness on 9th July 2009. He was born in 1952 and lived in Odžaci in the Vojvodina region of north Serbia and he took part in many group and solo exhibitions nationally and internationally over four decades.

He shared the Slovak background of Andy Warhol (Warhol’s parents were from Miková in north-eastern Slovakia) and maybe this had a small part to play in his passion for photobooth machines, something which interested Warhol too.

I had the good fortune to meet him twice during 2004 when I was working on art projects with Saša Marković and we were staging the 6th International Photobooth Convention in Belgrade. He came along to Belgrade to join in the activities and a few days later we travelled to visit him at his home. We spent an afternoon sharing a drink or two and looking through his many works and catalogues and because of his connection with Slovakia he also owned genuine photobooth strips of Andy Warhol. Maybe not the greatest photobooth artist but certainly the most well known so holding them in my hand was a moment to savor.

Of most importance were pieces relating to the 1997 show “First International Exhibition of Photo-Booth Photography” held at the Srecna gallery, Belgrade, for which he was curator, featuring photobooth work from South, Central and North America and all over Europe. I had a small piece showing and although I had been formulating the idea of a regular convention (still two years away) it spurred me on to achieve this goal.

I feel it can be honestly said that Jaroslav was one of ours.

—Mister Mixup, 2010

Supek in the booth at the 2004 International Photobooth Convention in Belgrade

Brian | 7:04 AM |

February 5, 2010

In a brief piece in Sunday’s Real Estate section, Christopher Gray of the New York Times answers a reader question about an penny arcade with Skee ball and pinball located near Times Square in the 1950s.

The spot in question, called Playland, is shown in the article as it appeared in 1952, with three beautiful photobooths lined up in front, in a photograph from the Office for Metropolitan History.

In addition to the three photobooths (and a neighboring “Record Your Voice” booth), the arcade seemed to have no fewer than seven different signs advertising the booths. Those were the days: four photos for a quarter, and a “Giant Malted” for fifteen cents.

Playland 1952 photograph [cropped], Office for Metropolitan History.

Brian | 12:35 PM |

December 17, 2009

I don’t know exactly when Blackpool got its photomaton, but this photo dates to the days when it was still “New.” The girl in the photo is wearing a pin in the shape of the Blackpool Tower on her coat, and has a somewhat mysterious half-smile on her face. At least I think it’s a girl; the hair, for that era, seems long for a boy’s, and the scarf under the coat…but who knows.

Brian | 8:42 PM |

November 23, 2009

Contributor Meags Fitzgerald sent us a writeup on an exhibition of the Centre Pompidou in Paris with some interest to the photobooth community.

The Centre Pompidou in Paris currently has an exhibition titled “La Subversion Des Images” or “The Subversion of Images”. It is an exhibition of Surrealist photographs and films. The Surrealists were particularly interested in working with the automatic and the spontaneous, so naturally they used the newly invented Photomaton in their artwork. The 1929 issues of “Variétés” and “La Revolution Surréaliste” (Surrealist publications) featured several photobooth pictures of members of the Surrealist movement, the exhibition features dozens of these original photobooth strips. It also has Rene Magritte’s famous “Je ne vois pas (la femme) cachée dans la fôret”, which features 16 photobooth pictures of the most well known Surrealists. The “Subversion of Images” includes strips taken by Andre Breton, Salivador Dali and many others. It is extremely well curated and is worth a visit if you are in the area. The exhibit opened September 23 and runs until January 11, 2010.

No photographs were allowed in the exhibition, this is a photo of one of the exhibit’s publications.

Thanks, Meags!

Brian | 8:11 AM |

November 12, 2009

Henry Ford is the man who brought us assembly lines and mass production (among other innovations). As a result, he seems like the kind of person who would have been fascinated with the photobooth: a self-contained photo developing assembly line used to mass produce snapshots. It is only fitting, then, that the Henry Ford Museum just put a collection of 80 photobooth photos on flickr. A few of the photo groupings seem to be from the same strip or of the same subject, which is always interesting to see. Additionally, Suzanne Fischer of the Museum’s staff has posted an entry in the museum’s blog about the photobooth photos.

Mr. Ford passed away in 1947 which would mean the last 20 years of his life were lived in a world with photobooths. I wonder if there are any photostrips of him?

A brief blurb on this collection went out via the Associated Press today.

Tim | 2:14 PM |

October 9, 2009

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.

Brian | 8:48 AM |

August 9, 2009

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.

Brian | 10:25 AM |

April 21, 2009

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.

Brian | 9:38 PM |

January 10, 2009

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.

Brian | 10:53 PM |

January 7, 2009

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.

Brian | 8:35 AM |

October 7, 2008

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

Brian | 2:50 PM |

September 14, 2008

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.

Brian | 8:38 PM |

September 13, 2008

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.

Brian | 6:00 PM |

September 10, 2008

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.

Brian | 10:05 PM |

September 9, 2008

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.

Brian | 12:08 PM |

August 3, 2008

As we continue to catalog the history of photobooths, the photos they produce, and the way people viewed, displayed, and shared those photos, we’ve come across some interesting items on eBay.



This beautiful deco frame, made to perfectly fit one photobooth photo, held a beautiful hand-tinted photo of a woman in a hat and fur. After it arrived, I noticed that another piece of paper seemed to be sitting behind the photo, and when I pulled it out, I discovered that it was another photo from the same strip. I pulled out the original photo, and discovered two more photos, as well, making what seemed to be the complete strip. None of the other three photos are tinted.

The corners of each photo are worn enough that I can’t be sure they all came from the same strip; they could be the chosen four from two sittings done one after the other, but either way, it was an excellent unadvertised surprise.

Brian | 4:49 PM |

June 26, 2008

We continue Photomaton Week here at Photobooth.net (don’t worry, it’s unofficial, you didn’t miss the announcement) with a spectacular trove of French photographic history. Thanks to a Google Alert pointing out a post on Dinosaurs and Robots, we found this group of photos that fits right in with the renaissance (nice) of the Parisian photobooth: an amazing set of more than 150 photobooth shots from the 1930s - 1950s, all featuring the friendly face of Willy Michel, Photomaton’s man in Paris during that time.

Titled “Aux origines du Photomaton,” the set of photos features faces that will be familiar to fans of the films of Melville, Clouzot, and Renoir, as well as some other recognizable faces, including a young Errol Flynn, Bing Crosby, Erich von Stroheim (wow!) and Arthur Rubenstein. Almost more fascinating than the faces of the actors are the faces of Michel, sometimes eerily consistent from photo to photo, but also greatly changed over the decades the photos were taken. It’s worth the time it takes to flip through all of these priceless photos, each a testament to the enduring power of the photobooth to capture a genuine, spontaneous moment in time.

Willy Michel and Charles Boyer from Aux origines du Photomaton.

Brian | 9:50 PM |

May 15, 2008

As many of our readers already know, from the notices it has received in The New Yorker and the New York Times, and mentions on our site and around the web, the book American Photobooth by our friend and colleague Nakki Goranin has been published, after many years of collecting, research, and writing on Nakki’s part. Our copy arrived in the mail today, as did an email about some related events in New York City, both of which we’ll discuss here.

Nakki’s book is a part history, part photo gallery, a lavishly illustrated 220+ pages of photobooth goodness, and anyone interested in the fascinating journey of photobooths from a small town in Siberia to every arcade, boardwalk, and drugstore in America and beyond, should pick up a copy.

The first eighty pages or so detail the history of the booth, from Anatol Josepho’s Photomaton through the various technological iterations and important families who contributed to the evolution of the booth, all the way up to digital booths in the present day. The remainder of the book consists of photos from Nakki’s collection, a wide variety of single photos, photostrips, hand-colored pictures, photomatic frames, photos from every era and walk of life imaginable.

In addition to the aforementioned press, the book has also been featured in The Telegraph, Vermont Public Radio, and People Magazine, among other national and international media outlets. Visit the Pine Street Art Works blog for more on the opening for the book, held there in February.

For our readers in the New York metro area, this Saturday, May 17th, brings a chance to hear Nakki discuss her book at the Jefferson Market Branch of the New York Public Library (Ave. of the Americas at 10th St.), and a related exhibition of photobooth photos from librarian, artist, and collector Billy Parrott will be on display in the lobby, and will be available through the end of May. We encourage our readers in the area to stop by and let us know how the talk and show go.

American Photobooth will be available for purchase at the talk, and is, of course, available from Amazon and everywhere books are sold, as they say.

Our hearty congratulations to Nakki on a great achievement, and a wonderful resource for photobooth enthusiasts to enjoy for years to come. We know how long you’ve been working on the book, and we’re happy to see it out in the world for all to enjoy.

Brian | 8:20 PM |

April 25, 2008

We’ve got a few updates this week, from the four (or at least three) corners of the media world. First, from mainstream TV, an advertisement that proves you can use a photobooth to sell anything. The Venus Embrace razor is the product in this case, in an ad that encourages women to use the razor and “Reveal the Goddess in You.” In one of a half-dozen scenes in the commercial, two girls go into a pseudo-photobooth and giggle under the heading “Goddess of Friendship.”

From the world of art and photography, we bring a two-page feature and brief interview with us here at Photobooth.net in the internationally-distributed magazine ISM: A Community Project. The piece, called Photobooths: The Art of the Self Portrait. It’s a nice piece, and it’s a great magazine, available at select newsstands or on ISM’s site now; we encourage you to pick up a copy.

And finally, another old photo with with what must be a great story behind it. At the risk of starting up a “Photomatic of the Week” feature, I thought I’d post this eBay gem, because it’s a great photo and a little unusual.



Not only does this Photomatic feature the great “Souvenir of the Nation’s Capital” backing, but the young soldier in the photo is sitting behind a prop with the body of what looks like the cherubic new year of 1941 painted on it, which makes for a great image. Written on the photo itself and mostly faded at this point is the question “Guess Who?”, and on the reverse is written the date “January 13, 42.” This date doesn’t make much sense with the New Year 1941 image, but it’s still a great photo.

Brian | 8:54 AM |

April 18, 2008

The history of the Photomatic will be the subject of another investigation at some point in the future, but I wanted to put up some images from some of the terrific Photomatic photos I’ve come across on eBay lately. These single-shot photobooths were found in railroad stations, nightclubs, and restaurants around the country, and many featured custom-designed backings that identified where the photo was taken.


This photo was taken at San Francisco’s Bal Tabarin nightclub, and instead of the traditional blanks on the back showing “Date” and “Place Taken,” this photo purports to show a member of the Bal Tabarin “Rogues Gallery,” and asks for “Date Entered” and “Behavior” to be filled in, though neither is on this particular photo. Some brief research turns up some information about Bal Tabarin, including this particularly helpful roundup of notes about the place. Check out this terrific amateur film from 1940 in the GLBT Historical Society collection for a brief glimpse of the exterior of this “Aristocrat of San Francisco Theater-Restaurants.” More Photomatics to come…

Brian | 11:26 PM |

March 17, 2008

Photobooth photos appear by the dozens on eBay every day, and sell for anywhere from 99¢ to $50, depending on their condition, subject matter, and provenance. After watching photobooth photo sales over the last few years, we’ve jumped in, tentatively, on a few occasions, and have found a few gems.

This miniature album, which is positively tiny (the photos are 1 1/2” by 1 7/8”), has room for ten photos, and came to me with seven photos, all of the same young soldier, inside. I’ve never seen anything like it, with its transparent color cover and plastic ring binding. I’ll be posting some other eBay finds as they come.

Brian | 9:09 AM |

January 9, 2008

We’re continually struggling against the tide of New Yorkers here at Photobooth.net West, never quite reaching that magic place where we’re ready for the newest issue when it comes, so it took until this week to make it to the December 24 & 31, 2007, issue. The Books article, titled “Visual Trophies,” by John Updike, focuses on the history of snapshots in America, which he describes through a review of the book The Art of the American Snapshot 1888-1978, the catalog for an exhibition of the same name at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.



It’s an interesting piece, and the exhibition and catalog sound intriguing for anyone with an interest in the history of photography as told through amateur, vernacular, anonymous photos. Somewhat strangely, though wonderfully, the article is illustrated with a half-page photo of a beautiful old photobooth, photographed by Harvey Stein, with a woman’s bare legs visible where the curtain should be. Below the large photo are five smaller portraits: four photobooth photos and one photo which might typically be called a snapshot. While we were excited to see photobooths so prominently featured, the article has precious little to do with photobooths at all, and we were left wanting a little more.

Updike follows the history of the snapshot as it is laid out in the book, and when dealing with writer Sarah Kennel’s section on 1920-1939 (titled “Quick, Casual, Modern”), he describes the way the easy-to-use cameras that were becoming commonplace at this time made all sorts of photos possible:

A number of somewhat racy exposures hint at the camera’s significant role as a de-inhibitor, an enabler of what Kennel calls “home-grown pornography.” Nudes in provocative poses were among the earliest fruits of big-box, slow-tech photography in the mid-nineteenth century; something about the camera’s impassive appropriation of whatever is set before it invites, like a psychoanalyst’s silence, self-exposure.

He then quotes from Nakki Goranin’s upcoming book American Photobooth, in which she describes the way photobooth users were “stripping off their clothes for the private photobooth camera.” This is, obviously, an important observation and an interesting indicator of the power of the photobooth and the sense of privacy it gave to those who used it, but by bringing up this passage as evidence of the way the simple new cameras liberated amateur photographers, Updike glosses over the fundamental differences between a photobooth and a camera used by a typical consumer at the time. A photobooth creates no negatives, and those women taking off their clothes and couples getting adventuresome in the booth were safe so long as the curtain stayed closed. Once their photos came out of the booth, they had all of the evidence, but for amateur shutterbugs who wanted to get a little racy, there was still the shame of sending the photos away to be processed by Kodak or dealing with the knowing glances of a drugstore photo counter employee. For an entire article about amateur photography, it seems odd to base a point around the way photobooth photography works, as well as to illustrate the piece with photobooth photos. Photobooth photography sits somewhere between amateur photography, studio photography, and automation, and it seems that the distinction between snapshots and photobooth photos still needs to be made a little more clearly.

Photos: Top © Harvey Stein. Bottom 1, 4, and 5: Nakki Goranin; 2 J.F.K. Library; 3 Collection of Robert E. Jackson.

Brian | 8:49 PM |

January 2, 2008

The eighty-year history of the photobooth is filled with little detours and fascinating stories; one of those that has just come to our attention recently is the history of the Phototeria.

Thanks to photography historian George Dunbar, we can now learn about the story of David McCowan and his Phototeria, a late 1920s photobooth that placed a single photograph onto a photosensitive metallic disk. Dunbar tells the story in his article “The Phototeria - A Canadian Invention” in the most recent issue of Photographic Canadiana, the journal of The Photographic Historical Society of Canada.

Thanks to George for letting us know about his article, and for his permission to post the PDF on Photobooth.net and let our readers learn about it.

Phototeria photo by George Dunbar

Brian | 9:18 PM |

December 3, 2007

A few items of note in the news recently:

First, a series of photobooth-style portraits taken by royal girlfriend Kate Middleton:

The 25-year-old girlfriend of Prince William was praised as she organised an exhibition by celebrity portrait photographer Alistair Morrison.

The prince showed his support by making a late appearance at the show. The exhibition - The Time To Reflect, at The Shop at Bluebird, in Kings Road - features dozens of Morrison’s celebrity photographs including Tom Cruise, Kate Winslet, Ewan McGregor, Catherine Zeta-Jones and Sting.

Many were taken in a special photobooth installed in the Dorchester Hotel in London and in venues in Los Angeles and New York as part of a project to raise money for the United Nations’ children’s fund, Unicef.

Limited editions of the originals are being sold at the show with half the proceeds going to the charity. All the proceeds from a £60 book of the passport-style images - complete with personal messages from the sitters - will benefit the same cause.

Also, more bad news for Photo-Me:

Shares in Photo-Me International, the company whose management was earlier this month forced out by angry shareholders, collapsed yesterday as it cut profits forecasts for the year.

Some thoughts from an English writer on passport photos:

I have just had my passport picture done. The result was not a pretty sight and got me thinking.

And a piece on photobooth enthusiast Nakki Goranin and her upcoming book, American Photobooth.

With an introduction written by David Haberstich, a Smithsonian curator of photography, the 224-page tome reveals happy, stern, wistful, goofy or blank facial expressions. Many images convey specific occupations, familial relationships, romantic entanglements and outlooks on life.

The author of the article gets Nakki, but doesn’t necessarily get the current state of photobooths: “Photobooths are still around, in malls and arcades, but now they’re digital.” I guess we’ll be going, then…

Brian | 5:00 PM |

May 3, 2007

Time for another update from the world of photobooth news, from the 1920s, the 1950s, and the 1960s.

• Time magazine’s website has put up the text of an April 4, 1927 article titled “Photomaton,” about inventor Anatol Josepho selling his invention to a “syndicate of men successful enough to know a real gold brick when they see one—including onetime Ambassador to Turkey Henry Morgenthau, President James G. Harbord of the Radio Corp. of America, John T. Underwood (typewriters), onetime Vice President Raymond B. Small of the Postum Cereal Co.” for $1 million.

• A blog post by Christian Patterson informs us of an exhibit at the gallery of John McWhinnie @ Glenn Horowitz Bookseller titled c/o The Velvet Underground, which commemorates the 40th anniversary of the release of The Velvet Underground and Nico. Included in the exhibition, among various works by Andy Warhol and music and lyrics by the Velvet Underground, are “Original Warhol screen test film stills and photo booth pictures.” The exhibition is open until May 12 at the gallery, located at 50 1/2 East 64th Street in New York. We’d love to have a report on the photobooth pictures if anyone stops by.

• A fascinating story in the Lewiston (Maine) Sun Journal tells the story of a wallet, lost to a mugger in April of 1951 (along with the victim’s pants), that was recently found during the renovation of the Paramount Theater in Boston. The wallet, lost by Val Gregoire on April 11, 1956, was found on April 11, 2007 by Richard Bagen when he tore down a wall in the theater. The wallet was returned to his widow, Jeannette; Gregoire passed away in 2003. In the wallet, “There were several pictures of Val, an 18-year-old Navy sailor at the time. There were images of his mom, friends and a laminated photo of Jeannette, then his best girl. But there also were two pictures - seemingly taken from a photo booth - of Val and another girl. ‘Mine was laminated,’ Jeannette said of her photo, a pretty young girl in pearls. ‘Maybe that meant something’.”

Photo of the contents of the wallet, including four photobooth photos, by Amber Waterman, © 2007 Lewiston Sun Journal.

Brian | 11:17 AM |

October 31, 2006

Another update of photobooth news from around the world of the arts, from music to museums to found photos, plus a few cases of run-ins with the law:

• Beck’s new album The Information features a lyric about photobooths, as reported in a recent review:

Take a little picture in a photobooth/
Keep it in a locket and I think of you/
Both of our pictures, face to face/
Take off your necklace and throw it away

• The Melbourne Photobooth Project at the 2006 Melbourne Fringe Festival gets a review in The Age.

• In the UK, artist Gillian Wearing’s work is profiled in The Guardian:

In 2003, Wearing exhibited five eerie photos of members of her family. We seemed to be looking at snapshots of the artist’s mother and father; a professional headshot of her smiling uncle; a snapshot of her shirtless brother in his bedroom brushing elbow-length hair; and a photo-booth picture of the artist herself at 17.

• Across the Channel in France, photobooth (or should we say photomaton) photos are featured at the Centre Pompidou. Thanks to Pat for the tip on these anonymous 1929 photos. Check out this solo photo and this strip as well. (If these links don’t work, search for ‘photomaton’ on the site).

• Something we haven’t noted before, a wonderful collection of found photos, more than 200 in all, at SquareAmerica.com, “a gallery of vintage snapshots & vernacular photography.”

• On a different note, we have news of more lewdness in the photobooth on the boardwalk in Seaside Heights, New Jersey.

• And finally, the story of a rejected passport application based on the photobooth photo the girl’s family provided.

A five-year-old girl’s passport application was rejected because her photograph showed her bare shoulders. Hannah Edwards’s mother, Jane, was told that the exposed skin might be considered offensive in a Muslim country. The photograph was taken at a photo-booth at a local post office for a family trip to the south of France.

Photo: Photomaton, Anonymous 1929. Centre Pompidou

Brian | 2:42 PM |

September 16, 2006

We don’t have an image of the photobooth photo yet, but the Poughkeepsie Journal reports that a new book of photographs called The Kennedy Mystique: Creating Camelot includes a photobooth shot of the future President and First Lady. Among the 150 photos, “Jack and Jackie appear in a photo-booth snapshot from 1953 - he smiling broadly and she appearing more reserved.”

John F. Kennedy: A Life in Pictures from Phaidon Press also seems to include a photobooth photo of the couple, dated 1956; we’ll keep on the lookout to see if these two photos are the same.

Brian | 9:28 AM |

August 22, 2006

An article in the Philadelphia Inquirer today announces the launch of a new photography website from the Smithsonian Photography Initiative. The article describes a few of the 1,800 photographs now available online, a small fraction of the massive Smithsonian photography collection. Among the photos in this first batch accessible online are photos of an extinct hyena, abolitionist John Brown, Jackson Pollock’s studio, and a photobooth photo of legendary photographer Ansel Adams.

There’s a zany self-portrait of Adams, taken in a photo booth. This 1930 snapshot with his hat pulled down to his eyes contrasts vividly with his open landscapes.

The photograph is from the collection of the Archives of American Art, in the Katherine Kuh Papers.

Photo: Ansel Adams, Photo Booth Self-Portrait, spi.si.edu.

Brian | 1:44 PM |

May 25, 2006

We’ve often thought of assembling a show or book made up of well-known people in photobooth photos, less along the lines of the MTV Photobooth celebrity-fest and more a collection of photos of people before they were well-known, or photos of people you might not expect to have been in a photobooth. Continuing where we left off with the Robert Johnson photobooth story from over a year ago, we’ll take a look at some other faces in history as they appear in photobooth pictures. These historical figures don’t have much in common, but we’ve gathered links to images of Elvis Presley, John Lennon and Yoko Ono, Anne Frank, and the world’s foremost Surrealists.

Tim told me about this “pre-fame” photo of Elvis Presley; one day I’d like to see it in person, especially without the watermark.

John Lennon and Yoko Ono included a reproduction of a photostrip, visible in this eBay auction, as part of the packaging for their 1969 “Wedding Album.” Apparently, on a side note, a photobooth photo of original Beatle Stu Sutcliffe was included in an exhibition in Liverpool a few years ago, as well.

A photobooth photo of Anne Frank is used as the cover of a book, pictured here. Visit GettyImages for more details on the photo.

Finally, check out the Guardian article about the Surrealists and the photobooth in Paris in the 1920s, and then look at the photos: two frames of a strip of Andre Breton from the Edwynn Houk Gallery, as well as low quality photos of Breton, Magritte, and Buñuel. Also, an article on the auction of those images.

Stay tuned for another installment of “famous people in the photobooth,” and please, send in any links and suggestions.

Brian | 8:20 AM |

March 24, 2005

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:

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.

Brian | 5:00 PM |

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