A quick trip to New York this weekend afforded the opportunity to check in on a few of the city’s working photochemical booths. First, I hadn’t yet had a chance to visit the booth at The Folly on Houston, though we’d had the booth listed here since last year. It was nice and quiet on a beautiful Saturday at mid-day, which meant that I wasn’t turned away for trying to bring a six-year-old into a bar, even if it was just to use the booth. The machine is working fine, and turned out a nice, if slightly grimy strip.
Our next stop was The Whitney Museum, where we’d visited last year to check out the Warhol exhibition. The photobooth installed to coincide with the exhibition was still there, even after the exhibition closed, which was a pleasant surprise. I’ve created a new entry for the machine, not because it’s a new machine, but because it’s got a brand-new appearance, and because it seemed necessary to note the booth’s claim to fame as having the highest-priced photostrip of any machine I’ve ever seen. A whopping $10 gets you “Whitney Souvenir Folio” specially designed to house the photostrip, revealing each photo in its own window (and allowing the fourth photo to show through the front cover), but still, in a world where the $1 photobooth is still a thing, it’s hard to imagine spending $10 on a strip more than once.
I balked when I saw the price initially, but of course had to take a strip just because, and I was pleasantly surprised by the folio. It’s the first time I’ve ever seen an add-on accessory for a photostrip offered at the point of purchase, so to speak, and though it takes the strip about as far from its usual status as an everyday, sometimes frivolous keepsake as you can imagine, I didn’t dislike it as much as I initially thought. It’s a nice idea, very well executed.
This morning, we had a chance to check in on booth at the Ace Hotel, and besides noting a price increase (now $6, plus tax, for a total of $6.54, which might be the highest-priced accessory-less strip around; New York prices!), I also was very impressed by the quality of the photos. Definitely the best of the weekend, and maybe some of the best I’ve seen from a public booth in a long time. Well done! And even though New York is no longer the photobooth mecca it was when we started this site nearly fifteen years ago, it still has at least a few nice booths in some great locations.
