We were so saddened this week to hear from Christian Bonifas, one half of the photobooth art duo Les Matons, that his partner Hélène Fabre passed away on December 8 at the age of 56. 

For nearly thirty years, Les Matons created a huge body of work based on photobooth photographs, which culminated in a final exhibition at the Bibliothèque de Carré d’Art in their home city of Nîmes, France, in October 2019. 

In addition to their immense creative work and publication, Hélène and Christian have been some of the most steadfast and prolific contributors to Photobooth.net, beginning shortly after I first corresponded with them in 2007.

We owe them a huge debt of gratitude, and send our heartfelt best wishes to Christian.

A piece in Nîmes Gazette Live touches on Hélène’s life and contributions. In translation, 

Half of Les Matons is no more. Wednesday, December 8, Hélène Fabre died suddenly at the age of 56. With Christian Bonifas, Hélène formed Les Matons from 1988 to 2017, a duo of artists using photobooths as a means of expression.

“Their work is both simple and poetic. Their photos are fueled by objects, props, and clothing. There is a real aesthetic and joy,” commented gallery owner Pascal Adoue de Nabias at a retrospective in May 2019. 

That same year, the Carré d’Art library presented their work as part of the 20th anniversary of Documentary Film Month.

At La Gazette, where she wrote the exhibition pages and part of the cultural agenda for twenty years, Hélène leaves a void much larger than her discreet presence.

Her funeral will take place on Wednesday, December 15th at 4pm at the crematorium of Nîmes.

I was lucky to have met Christian and Hélène at the Derriere le rideau exhibition in Lausanne, Switzerland, in February of 2012, where we took the somewhat poorly executed photostrip at right. 

Over the course of 2020, my pandemic projects slowly went from April’s somewhat lofty “finally work on that idea for a book I’ve had in the back of my mind” to June’s rather lazier “watch 300 comedies and action films from the ’80s.” It didn’t start out that expansive, to be honest, but quickly snowballed out of control, finally coming to an end as the year closed, at which point I had unwittingly watched more body-switch comedies than I knew existed.

All the while, of course, I kept my eyes out for photobooths and photostrips, and though I was somewhat disappointed in the slim number of examples I came across, there were still a few surprises and memorable appearances. In chronological order, then, (some of) the photobooths and photostrips of 1980s cinema:

A brief glimpse of a booth at Union Station in Chicago in Continental Divide (1981)



An upgraded frame grab from a Blu-ray that confirms that the film uses a real photostrip of Jennifer Jason Leigh in Fast Times at Ridgemont High (1982)



Two color strips of Nicolas Cage in Valley Girl (1983)



Proper aspect-ratioed frame grabs of the stills we already had on the site, plus a few I’d missed before, from The Karate Kid (1984)



Tracey Ullman looks at a strip of her missing boyfriend in Give My Regards to Broad Street (1984)



Canadian teens pass by a photobooth in use in Breaking All the Rules (1985)



One of the German rockers offering a ride out of West Berlin presents his passport, complete with color photobooth photo, in Gotcha! (1985)



Helen Hunt trims a photobooth photo of herself to glue onto a picture of Eddie Van Halen in Girls Just Want to Have Fun (1985)



Helen Slater shows off a number of photostrips tucked in a mirror in Ruthless People (1986)



Upgraded stills of the photobooth murder sequence in Best Seller (1987)



Sylvester Stallone’s character has a photostrip of his kid tucked in the row of his semi cab in Over the Top (1987)



A photostrip appears in a TV ad seen in The Couch Trip (1988)



Bounty hunter Jack Walsh (Robert De Niro) trims a photobooth photo to modify the FBI ID badge he’s just stolen in Midnight Run (1988)



A single photobooth photo can be seen in one scene in Tapeheads (1988)



Two photobooths in Chicago’s Union Station: one in Vice Versa (1988)…



and another in the background of this shot from The Package (1989)



A strip featuring Kevin Kline and Susan Sarandon is one of the more amusing moments in The January Man (1989)



Martin Short offers a (faked) photostrip to be used in procuring a fake passport in Three Fugitives (1989)



A photostrip of Veronica and Heather in a locker in Heathers (1989)



Sally Kirkland uses an airline first aid kit to trim and re-connect a photostrip in Cold Feet (1989)



It’s safe to say a similar trip through the 1970s would yield an even stronger crop of photobooths and photostrips, but for the time being, we’ll be taking them one at a time. As always, your tips and submissions are welcome.