Bloomberg’s Carly Berwick reports on a new exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art that pays tribute to the late Susan Sontag. Sontag’s words are paired with photos she wrote about, and others that illustrate her ideas. Included is a Warhol photobooth strip:

The recently acquired Peter Hujar photograph of Sontag herself, taken in 1975, reveals the writer reclining, relaxed but fearsome. A quote nearby states that “photographs instigate, confirm, seal legends.” Sontag’s words become the occasion for putting the Hujar next to a circa-1963 Warhol photo-booth strip of self-portraits…

I was a big “Weird Al” Yankovic fan when I was a kid, I have to say. The real beginnings of my awareness of popular music coincided nicely with the advent of the CD, so I didn’t have many store-bought tapes besides a “Straight Up” cassingle here and a “Cocktail” soundtrack there… But I owned a cassette of every “Weird Al” album I could get my hands on, even the ones that parodied songs I didn’t know. I loved them for the same reasons everyone else did: they were funny. They were smart, too, and kind of amazing, the way he could make his songs sound just like the ones he was mocking. He’s a wonderful sort of constant in the world; even when you’re not paying attention, he’s still out there, doing what he does best.

A chance hearing of “You’re Pitiful,” his parody of the ubiquitous James Blunt song, brought us to his website, where, in his Photo Gallery, we found no fewer than eleven different photobooth shots, some with two photos blended together, of Al from his childhood. The list of “Famous in the Photobooth” gets a little longer.

Photo: Photo booth fun #1, weirdal.com.

As Ed Blank of the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review writes in a review of The Break-Up, the tradition of photobooth photos as relationship montage is alive and well in 2006; it’s a wonder that it hasn’t gotten old yet. We’re not complaining, but have these people seen any movies before making this one?

After a montage of wacky photo-booth snapshots, which passes for the courtship, we cut straight to the stress.

We’ll see whether they’re real photobooth shots or not, and get a page up for the film once the DVD is released.