Our friend and contributor Klaas Dierks has organized an exhibition of photobooth photos at a gallery in Hamburg. The show, called “Wait until Dry — Identities out of the Booth” brings together the photobooth photo collections of three artists, and opens next week.

The artists Irina Ruppert, Sven Heckmann and Klaas Dierks have collected thousands of photobooth pictures for years and present a selection of them at the „Raum für Photographie” (room for photography) in Hamburg, Germany, from the 5th of June to the 3rd of July 2008. The photos on exhibition were made in photobooths between 1928 and 1988 and originate from all over the world. 

By combining the photos across time and place, the artists instill new meaning in their objects trouvée and let the imagination wander.

Raum für Photographie
Kampstrasse 8
Open Thursday through Saturday 12.00 — 19.30 pm
20357 Hamburg
www.raum-fuer-photographie.de

We encourage our readers in the area to attend and let us know what they see, and we’ll be posting photos from the show courtesy of Klaas next month. 

Photobooths have been popping up all over the place in the advertising world lately, and we’re doing our best to keep up with the trend. A few recent additions follow: first, a brief shot of some blown-up photostrips of Ellen Degeneres in a commercial for American Express.



Next, a promotion from Coppertone sun block featuring what they call the “DermaPhoto Booth,” a portable booth that takes a photo of your face that reveals hidden damage to your skin caused by the sun. The booth will be traveling around the country this summer, so you may have a chance to get your DermaPhoto taken and see the scary results.



Today, I caught an ad for E! Entertainment television featuring personalities from their upcoming shows at a carnival, taking part in various activities including posing in the photobooth:



And finally, CBS has been promoting its show “Two and a Half Men” with some ubiquitous bus banners on Metro buses all around Los Angeles; thanks to Aimee for catching this one with her camera:

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.

Just an update to let folks know that through some nose-to-the-grindstone work on Tim’s part, we (think we) have solved the persistent and ongoing problem of spam comments in the Photobooth.net Discussion Board. Over the years, a lot of interesting questions and helpful answers have been posted on the board, but we’ve been subject to spam overload off and on, making it difficult to find the real messages amongst the chaff and noise. 

We’ve got some beefed-up anti-robot security in place now, and we think we’ve got the problem solved. We had to delete a few thousand spam accounts, so if you had registered but not posted, your account may have been deleted, for which we apologize. Most legitimate account-holders should have been spared, so head on over to browse around, ask questions, and offer up your answers and suggestions. Thanks.