We’ve got two new additions to our ever-surprising, ever-growing catalog of photobooths in movies and television. This section, along with the Photobooth Directory, was one of the earliest parts of this website, and it’s still one of the most interesting and oft-updated. 

I watch a lot of movies as part of my job, as well as a fair number of trailers as of late, and for the first time, last week, I was watching a trailer for a film I’d never seen (or even heard of) and out of the blue, I spotted a photobooth! My colleagues probably wondered why I shouted “Hey!” in the middle of the screening, but then again, most of them know about this site, so they probably weren’t too surprised. The film was a mostly forgotten 1971 comedy starring David Niven, Virna Lisi, John Cleese, and Robert Vaughn, called The Statue.

Niven plays Alex Bolt, a Nobel prize-winning linguist who spends more attention to his work than his wife, a sculptor played by Lisi. As a way of exacting her revenge for a life of neglect, she sculpts an 18′ tall statue of her husband for display in Grosvenor Square, but gives the statue another man’s appendage, so to speak, and tells her husband it’s not modeled on his. 

Bolt then spends the rest of the movie trying to find the man who provided his wife with the life model for that particular part. He uses a photobooth, one of the only ways to get a photo taken without anyone else seeing the results in those days before digital, to take a set of photos of his own to compare against. It’s not a terrific film, but the pleasure of seeing the strait-laced Niven stripping down in a photobooth in a groovy teenage arcade is pretty funny.

We also received a tip from our friend Jeff, the man behind the Art of Waiting contest we helped out with last year, that a photochemical booth made an appearance in the background of a recent episode of “The Chicago Code.” His eagle eye was right; after freeze-framing on the photobooth in the scene and comparing it with every booth we have listed in Chicago, we confirmed that the scene was shot at Skylark, home to this photobooth. I thought the bar looked somewhat familiar; I had visited there in 2005, at the end of a very long day visiting 17 photobooth locations around the city. Upon closer inspection, you can see a piece of paper on the door that reads “Skylark” as the police enter the bar; when they leave, though, a larger sign above the door reads “McGowan’s Pub,” in line with the plot centering on Irish mob criminal activity.

Our friends at Chicago’s 312 Photobooth have opened a studio in nearby Oak Park where you can take your picture in a photobooth, peruse their photography-related items for sale, arrange the rental of a booth for your next party, and check out photography on display on their walls.

The studio features multiple working photobooths, including a beautiful Model 11, which we’ve listed in our Photobooth Directory.

Anthony and Andrea and their new digs have been featured in the local press on more than one occasion lately. Read about the 312 Photobooth Studio in the local Oak Park Leaves as well as the TribLocal for Oak Park.

This week, we heard from Olivia Pintos-Lopez, a photographer and photobooth enthusiast in Australia, about a couple of different projects. First, her photoshoot for Small Magazine hich we mentioned yesterday.

She is also behind a project that just concluded at West Space in Melbourne called Picture Yourself:

Analog photo booths are a quintessential, yet vanishing, part of the mall experience. Closing the curtain of a photo booth creates a private space for self-reflection and self-representation in the transitory areas of commercial spaces. For Picture Yourself, Olivia Pintos-Lopez will use the photo booth on the floor above The West Wing to photograph participants and record a three-minute aural portrait as the images develop. The strip of photos will be exhibited as a singular superimposed image. The sound portraits will be presented as anonymous stories that the viewer can listen in on, disconnected from a particular portrait. The resulting portraits will be exhibited in The West Wing and will be added to over the two weeks as more portraits of mall visitors are collected.

We’ve also archived the show in our Projects section, where you can read more about the show in the artist’s words.

‘Nuff said, right? Well, you’ve got to see it to believe it; check out the ad in our Movies & TV section.

Mr. Chan’s work for Austrian Railways is just one ad we’ve posted today. Others include a couple of German commercials for Nivea, for “Body Milk” and for some sort of soccer giveaway.

“Photobox”

And “Enter Play Win.”

Next, we’ve got “Stilbruch,” a German television piece about photobooths, featuring the men behind Photoautomat.

Next, a music video from France, “Salo-Maso,” by Najar and Perrot.

Next, a couple of brief photostrip appearances in Banksy’s Oscar-nominated documentary Exit Through the Gift Shop.

And finally, thanks to Olivia Pintos-Lopez for letting us know about a photoshoot she organized for an online publication, Small Magazine, using photobooth photos taken in a black and white booth in Melbourne, Australia.

We’ve been busy dealing with some behind-the-scenes issues on the blog lately, but that hasn’t slowed our continuing effort to add to our ever-growing catalog of photobooths in popular culture and in the world at large. 

First, we have a major update to our listings for the city of Portland. The city seems like a hospitable home for photochemical photobooths, but this hasn’t always been the case. Back when I visited the city in 2004, we were only able to find but one working photobooth in town. Just a few years later, things have changed in a big way, and Portland now ranks with Chicago and New York as an American photobooth capital. 

Thanks to Victoria for sending us photos and information for these these seven new photobooth locations:

Alleyway Cafe and Bar

Beauty Bar

My Father’s Place

Slingshot Lounge

Star Bar

The Boiler Room

The Saratoga

Next up, more updates in our quest to catalog photobooths in film and television. First, television, in the form of both programs and commercials. 

Ellen

A commercial for the bladder control medicine Vesicare

Wildfire

Fringe

And, thank goodness, The Bachelor

And now, film. First, Richard Kelly’s Southland Tales, thanks to Igor for the tip.

And finally, Jean Aurel’s 1964 comedy De l’amour, which I regard as a great discovery in the world of photobooths in cinema. Thanks, Les Matons!

The newspapers of Australia’s Fairfax Media Limited have hit the stands today with a one-two punch of photobooth-related stories by reporter Lindy Percival. First, the bad news: in The Age, Percival interviews Melbourne photobooth proprietor Alan Adler in a piece titled “Future of the old photo booth not so picture perfect” (archived on our site here). Adler, who has been running photochemical booths in Melbourne for nearly 40 years, sees the end of the business in sight, saying “We’re having trouble getting paper at the moment. I’ve got a couple of months’ supply and I’m hoping I get some more, but it’s becoming very expensive … We’ll keep going for another couple of years probably. But I’d sooner be playing with my grandchildren than playing with photo booths.” Here’s hoping he keeps up the booths as long as he can; we know those machines have a lot of fans (see our Melbourne listings here, here, and here).

Then, of course, there’s the good news. In a companion piece in the Sydney Morning Herald called “The strip of a lifetime” (archived here), Percival writes about the enthusiasts and artists who are still using the photochemical booths today, with a timely look at Raynal Pellicer’s book Photobooth: The Art of the Automatic Portrait (which we’ll review soon) and a mention of our site as well. Australia’s photobooths are some of the furthest-flung examples of the photochemical machine still in use today, cherished by locals and sought out by visitors, and we hope renewed interest thanks to these articles will help them continue well into the future.

I’ve been on the lookout for interesting Photomatic photos for a few years now, and have found a few on eBay and at photo shows, but I’ve never seen one quite like this. It features a flat frame and customized back panel like many Photomatics, but the photo isn’t one that was taken in a traditional Photomatic booth. 

Instead, it looks like the machine was set up inside a “Can-Do-Special” (“Can-Do,” “C and O,” very clever), a “full-size replica of a 490 engine cab” from the Chesapeake and Ohio Railroad, according to this photograph and description found on the Cleveland State University’s Cleveland Memory Project site.

The unnamed little girl poses as though she’s operating the train, and the Photomatic’s flash is seen reflected in the window to her left. We can see part of the control mechanisms, a sign reading “C and O,” and a few lines from some handwritten documents hanging on the wall above her. It’s a wonderful photograph, recording an exciting moment in this girl’s life, but also capturing the heyday of two technologies now consigned to the museum: the steam engine and the Photomatic photobooth.

While it’s a change that probably means more to those of us behind the curtain (get it?) than to our readers, we’re happy to announce that we’ve successfully emerged from a somewhat hairy changeover from Movable Type, the blogging platform with which we began this site back in 2005, to WordPress, something we’ve wanted to do for years but finally had the time and inclination to do recently. Thanks to Tim for all of his technical expertise, to MakeMyBlogPretty.com for their migration walk-through, and to the creators of the plugins and widgets we used to make the transition as seamless as possible for our readers: Custom Upload Dir, PHP Markdown, Search and Replace, Relevanssi, Wickett Twitter Widget, and Widget Context.

The only changes readers will notice will be for the better, we hope: better searching, fewer missing pages due to crashes on the back end, and so on. We’re still checking through to make sure all of our entries and comments are there, that all of the incoming links to our old pages redirect to our new ones, and so on, so if you see anything fishy, please let us know. We look forward to years of greater stability, flexibility, and creativity in the future. Now, back to those photobooths…