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…

We were pleased this week to get our hands on a copy of Cameron Woo’s new book Photobooth Dogs, a charming collection of photobooth photos of dogs (with and without their owners) spanning the 80+ year history of the invention.

We were first introduced to Cameron, who’s the co-founder and creative director of the dog-centric magazine Bark, when we heard about a collection of photobooth photos of dogs he put together for a 2005 issue of the magazine.

Later on, Cameron asked us for help in finding photos of dogs in photobooths, and though we weren’t able to be of much help, we were excited to hear about his book. Having had a chance to take a look at it, it’s been worth the wait: the book is a wonderful collection of photos, each with a story to tell about the beloved pets they capture.

It’s very nicely designed, features excellent photo reproduction, and intersperses a (very) few choice quotations about dogs between the photos. I especially appreciate the visual guide to sources at the end, for the few photos in the book that aren’t in Cameron’s personal collection.

The book has a page on the Bark website, with a link to buy the book as well.

A few weeks ago, I spotted a bus shelter ad out of the corner of my eye and wondered “Is that a photostrip?” Upon closer investigation, indeed it was, a strange five-frame hybrid strip featured in an ad for Kate Spade. 

Digging a little deeper, we found out that the photobooth in general was included in Kate Spade’s book of “Things We Love” this year, available for browsing in an online version complete with page-flipping animations. 

Clicking around some more, we found another version of the book on the site with links to sites having to do with each item — the trailer for i am Cuba, the terrific photo book Store Front — the Disappearing Face of New York, and the wonderful Movie Title Stills Collection site, to name a few. What do you think happens when you click on the photostrip? That’s right, you’re brought right here to our very own Photobooth Directory. Thanks, Kate, for sending folks our way.

Our listings for Australia got a boost this month as we received five submissions from Victoria (the person, not the state), both black and white and color booths from Melbourne and Adelaide.

Included in the updates is the legendary Flinders Street Station in Melbourne, where Elvis Costello shot his video for “I Wanna Be Loved” (though the booth has changed over the years).

The newly listed locations are as follows:

Flinders Street Station I

Flinders Street Station II

Century City Walk

Myer Centre Adelaide I

Myer Centre Adelaide II

Thanks again to Victoria for filling in some more holes in the Great Photobooth Map!

Thanks to Amy Powell for letting us know about the black and white booth at Club 185 in Ohio’s capital city, Columbus. 

She also sent in a series of scanned photostrips as well as digital photos of those photos being taken:

We’re happy to add another booth to our directory, and encourage our readers to help out by making a new year’s resolution: tell us about that booth you and your friends have been visiting for years but that isn’t listed on our site yet. Contribute a booth today!