It’s been a busy year for the photobooth. As 2012 comes to a close, we’re taking a look at what the last twelve months have brought in the the world of the venerable photochemical machine, now in its tenth decade of life.
Most notably, this was the year that audiences around Europe got to see the most comprehensive and significant exhibition on the history and art of the photobooth ever produced. Curated by Clément Chéroux, Sam Stourdzé, and Anne Lacoste at the Museé de l’Elysee in Lausanne, the exhibition was titled “Derrière le rideau: L’esthétique du photomaton,” or “Behind the Curtain: The Aesthetics of the Photobooth.” I was honored to be able to contribute to both the printed catalog and the exhibition itself, and I traveled to Lausanne for the opening in February. After Lausanne, the show traveled to Le Botanique in Brussels and then to Vienna, where it remains open for another two weeks at the Kunst Haus Wien.
Back in the U.S., another international photobooth event was on the horizon. Three years after our very successful event in Chicago we hosted another International Photobooth Convention. This time, we gathered two photochemical photobooths and a major collection of world-class photobooth art in the sunny confines of Venice, California, and enjoyed two nights and a day of photobooth fun. Read all about it here.
The 2012 Photobooth Convention led to our first official publication, a 25th Anniversary Catalog celebrating the past and present work of the pioneering photobooth artists who first displayed their art in Rochester, New York in 1987. Limited copies of the catalog are still available for purchase; you can order them here, along with signed and numbered copies of the beautiful poster for the show.
We finished up the convention with a terrifically fun photobooth crawl in a hired van around Los Angeles.
As we do with every convention, we produced a collaborative project with those who attended. This time, it was a collection of Photobooth Shorts, movies told in just four photobooth frames. We still have a limited quantity of numbered copies left for sale; follow the link to get your copy.
On the site itself, we’ve had a busy year of updates. We continue to discover new photobooth locations ourselves, and learn about them from contributors all over the world. In 2012, we added 48 new photobooth locations, plus countless additions, corrections, and updates to other locations already in our directory.
2012 also proved that the photobooth craze in movies, TV, and print shows no sign of slowing. This year, we’ve added 24 new movies, 22 new albums, 21 new TV shows, 15 new magazine articles, 14 new commercials, 10 new music videos, and six new newspaper articles.
The year also saw 30 entries in our blog, from Jack White’s appearance on ‘American Pickers’ to more recent omnibus recaps of additions to our various collections of photobooth appearances around the world. 2012 also brought our first ever guest blog entry, a travelogue from Meags Fitzgerald about her epic European photobooth adventures. Visit our Archives to poke around the entries from the past year.
If we can read anything into these stats and highlights, it’s that the photochemical photobooth is alive and well in 2012, thanks to the vibrant and committed community of enthusiasts around the world, many of whom we had the pleasure of meeting this year.
Best Wishes from Photobooth.net for a joyous, peaceful, productive, and photobooth-filled 2013! (And Happy New Year from two of the youngest members of the Photobooth.net community, both booth enthusiasts in the making)