Archives: Music
Booths springing up everywhere
April 6, 2008
Another quick re-cap of photobooths in the news lately…
I can’t seem to determine if the episode ever aired, as it’s not available on ABC.com or via any other less legal means, but a February taping of Extreme Makeover: Home Edition took place at the Hughes home in Louisville, Kentucky, and a black and white dip and dunk photobooth was installed in one of the boys’ rooms. A Louisville Courier-Journal article describes the home, and an accompanying video shows the booth as an integral part of the photo-centric bedroom.Also, thanks to Chris F. for pointing us to the new video from Million Dollar Strong, made up of Mike O’Connell and Yoshido, a.k.a. Ken Jeong, the doctor from Knocked Up. Check out the moments from the video featuring the Bar 107 photobooth in our Music Video section, or watch the video on YouTube.
The blog at Modern Mechanix has featured two blasts from the photobooth past recently: first, an article about Anatol Josepho from 1928 titled “Penniless Inventor Gets Million for Photo Machine,” and second, a shorter piece about the invention of the Photomatic machine: “New Automatic Machine Delivers Metal-Framed Photos.” It’s great to see these hard-to-find magazine pieces archived, at least for now, on the web.
And finally, thanks to Tim, each of our photobooth locations now features a nifty Google map right on the location page, to make your photobooth-hunting even easier.
Brian | 3:21 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Spring update
March 3, 2008
Some recent additions to the site, as well as photobooth news:
Photobooth auteur Jean-Pierre Jeunet, the man behind Amélie, directed a video for ’80s French pop sensation Etienne Daho featuring animated photobooth photos, years before he and Audrey Tautou made photobooths hip again
Adrian Saker’s 25 years in the photobooth, as seen above
One of our favorite photobooth locations, Faces in Northampton, Mass., has replaced their color booth with a black and white machine.
Grammy winner and tabloid idol Amy Winehouse was snapped carrying a framed set of photobooth photos out of her London abode as she prepared to move to the country; apparently this is big news, and you can find photos of the photostrips on this blog, and this one, and on the Daily Mail’s site. And finally, this bit is a little old, and we’ll have to do some more research to see what came of it, but Women’s Wear Daily reports on a vintage booth accompanying promotion for designer Stella McCartney’s products at Selfridge’s department store:
McCartney’s brand blitz at Selfridges isn’t just about commerce, however. Caricature artists will be on hand to draw customers’ portraits throughout the two weeks, and a one-man band commissioned by McCartney will play. The designer will also install a vintage photo-booth on Selfridges’ second floor, in which customers can take a shot of themselves for 1 pound, or about $2, which will be donated to the Red Cross. McCartney will make a personal appearance during London Fashion Week on Feb. 13.
25 Year Photobooth Portrait © 1982-2008 Adrian Saker.
Brian | 8:03 AM | Comments (2)
Cue the music, please
August 28, 2007
As long as we’ve been running Photobooth.net, which is just about two and a half years now, we’ve been planning a section devoted to photobooths in music. It’s a natural corollary to our looks at movies, television, and printed media, and it’s a topic that is rife with fascinating examples. We’ve always had a sub-section devoted to music videos, but with the head start we had on the movies section and the photobooth directory from the predecessor to this site, we had more than enough to work with, and music went by the wayside.
Well, after much organizing, gathering, and stalling followed by working, we are pleased to present our latest effort, Photobooths in Music. The section is divided into three categories. The first is an expanded and updated look at Photobooths in Music Videos, from Madness and Elvis Costello to Jessica Simpson and Natasha Bedingfield, with a lot of interesting bands and musicians in between.
The second section takes a look at the use of photostrips, and to a lesser extent photobooths themselves, in album art, on the covers and in the liner notes of LPs, CDs, and other recorded media. These run the gamut from well-known classics like Liz Phair’s Exile in Guyville to more obscure works like Electrelane’s single for “The Bells” and “Photolab 9000” by the Swedes.
The final section examines the role of photobooths in song lyrics, ranging from a passing reference in a lyric to the title and subject of a song. From mega-bands like U2 to singer-songwriters like Elliott Smith, musicians have used the idea of the photobooth and the photos it produces to convey a host of different ideas and feelings. Bands like The Books and Death Cab for Cutie have even named songs after the photo-making machines; my new favorite is “Photobooth Curtain” by School for the Dead.
We’d like to thank everyone whose contributions have added immensely to our store of knowledge, and we’d also like to acknowledge and thank Mr. Mixup, who will be curating the Music section along with us, as we owe many of the items in this new section to his years of research and collecting.
We know that what we have is by no means definitive, and we hope the launch of this new section will spur a thousand contributions from readers to help us make it more complete. With that, please, enjoy Photobooths in Music.
Brian | 8:31 AM |
The Hold Steady wants your photostrips
July 25, 2007
Twin Cities-born and Brooklyn-based The Hold Steady have placed a solicitation for black and white photobooth pictures on their website, in preparation for production of their forthcoming single.
In a post titled “The Hold Steady Needs Your Help” dated July 1, the band makes the following announcement:
The Hold Steady want you to scan and send in BLACK AND WHITE PHOTOBOOTH photos of you and your friends to photobooth@vagrant.com
The band will use the photobooth pictures for the artwork on their forthcoming new single as well as in the marketing for the release.
The photobooth photos NEED to be Black and White.
The post comes complete with a link to a release form PDF to be filled out by the contributor. Let us know if any loyal readers submit their photos to the band. We look forward to seeing the results, and now have one more reason to get our Music section started.
Brian | 3:43 PM |
Video vault bonanza
June 24, 2007
We’ve made some additions and updates to the site this weekend, including three new (and one upgraded) music videos. Above, scenes from the first music video on the site, Aerosmith’s Crazy, as well as Jeremy Burgan’s Can You See Us? We’ve got much improved images from Crazy, and we’re happy to have Burgan’s video, which we saw being made out at the Cha-Cha Lounge one night, on the site. Below, we’ve got scenes from Modlang’s Factory Hour and Natasha Bedingfield’s Single, one from YouTube and one in high-def. Oh well, you take what you can get.
Also this week, we’ve got new locations in Long Beach, California, as well as three more Amy’s Ice Creams shops (one, two, three) in Austin, Texas. And finally, a new example of a photostrip in TV, from Edgar Wright and Simon Pegg’s pre-Shaun of the Dead/Hot Fuzz effort, Spaced.
Brian | 8:06 PM |
100 Punks
October 28, 2006
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.
Brian | 5:01 PM |
Tex Tubb and Jessica Simpson
July 28, 2006
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.
Brian | 2:46 PM |
Stephen Fretwell in the booth
May 5, 2006
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.
Brian | 4:55 PM | | TrackBack
Arctic Monkeys' pseudo-photobooth?
January 26, 2006
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.
Brian | 7:33 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
Robert Johnson photobooth controversy
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:
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.
Brian | 5:00 PM | Comments (1)
NYT: The Kills in the photobooth at 7B
February 9, 2005
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.
