Just when you start to think you’re hearing more about photobooths disappearing than you are about new locations being discovered, a kind reader of our site will send in a massive update that makes you feel a little better about the whole situation. Courtesy of Meags Fitzgerald, we just received a big update, twelve photobooths in all, none of which have appeared on the site before. 

We’re adding them in installments, so the first to go up are the Canadian locations: nine booths in Alberta and one in Vancouver. The majority of the new booths are in Calgary, which just jumped from “unlisted” to somewhere in the top ten as far as active photochemical photobooth cities are concerned. We’ve always known that Canada is home to many active photobooths, but beyond a few in Toronto and BC, we haven’t had much documentation before now.

So here they are:

Edmonton City Centre 

Bonnie Doon Shopping Centre, Edmonton

Northland Village Mall I, Calgary

Northland Village Mall II, Calgary

North Hill Centre, Calgary

Eau Claire Market, Calgary

Deerfoot Mall, Calgary

Chinook Centre, Calgary

Calgary Greyhound Station

Antisocial Skate Shop, Vancouver

I don’t think we’ve ever seen a photobooth decked out like a bag of popcorn (at the Chinook Mall), but now that I see it, I can’t believe no one else seems to have thought of it before now. Very nice. Thanks to Meags for these locations, and we’ll have the rest of her contributions soon.

Our trickle of new additions to the site continues, with two new locations and news of a photobooth gallery show, for those of you in the Pacific Northwest. First, thanks to Nathan for our long-awaited first-ever photobooth location in Montréal. We’ve long known of Montréal’s great Metro station photobooths, and even taken a few photostrips (and squares) there in the days before Photobooth.net, but we’ve never had an official submission to the site. Here’s hoping the booth at the Rosemont Metro Station is the first of many.

We received word of a new photobooth location in Portland a few months back, so after much delay, we’re happy to list the black and white booth at the House of Vintage, thanks to Victoria. And speaking of Portland, our friend Myles Haselhorst, whom we first met here in L.A. earlier this year sent us news of a photobooth exhibition that just opened at his gallery, Ampersand Vintage:

Out of the Booth : Photobooth Enlargement from the Robert E. Jackson Collection

July 29th to August 23rd, 2009

For a little over a decade, Robert Jackson has been collecting vintage American snapshots, an activity that culminated in a 2007 exhibition at the National Gallery titled “The Art of the American Snapshot 1888–1978.” The photographs exhibited in that show provided a comprehensive record of all the nuances, anomalies, visual tricks & standard subjects that comprise what one thinks of as a typical (& in some cases, not so typical) American snapshot. The same can be said of Jackson’s collection of vintage photobooth images, the single panels & unclipped strips being suggestive of what he considers the photobooth’s ability to meld a sort of unseen photographic technology with one’s personal aesthetic. Collaborating in the curatorial process with Jackson, our August show features enlargements of 32 pieces from his collection that exemplify the uncanny, self-expressive quality inherent in photobooth images. 

More information here.

And finally, a new film has been added to our list, last year’s Choke starring Sam Rockwell and Anjelica Huston.

We’ve posted the first of the backlog of submissions and new additions to the site since our hiatus; in the true spirit of summer, they’re locations at state fairgrounds and beachside boardwalks. 

Check out the black and white photobooths at the Minnesota State Fair in Minneapolis, as well as Jilly’s Arcade and Castaway Cove in Ocean City, New Jersey. Thanks to Tony for the Minnesota booth, and thanks to my friend Molly for doing what no other friend has, and following through on that promise: “Oh, you run a website about photobooths? Next time I see one, I’ll take a picture of it for you.“



Photo by Molly Wheeler

We seem to have taken a bit of an enforced summer vacation here at Photobooth.net, but thanks to some yeoman’s work from Tim, the three major functions of the site — the blog; the databases of locations, art, movies, and so on; and the discussion board — all seem to be back up and running. The discussion board is functioning again, though we’re still working on getting it looking sharp again. We’ll be rolling out a bunch of new locations, films, artists, and so on over the next few days, the backlog from a few months of no postings. Thanks again for your patience.

I was going to title this “Another reason America doesn’t need Jay Leno to stick around any longer,” or simply “Jay Leno is an idiot,” but I thought I’d try to be more charitable. We don’t usually cover much having to do with digital photobooths on the site, but this was too much to pass up. Jamie Lee Curtis was a guest on the Tonight Show last Friday night (starts at about 25:30), and ostensibly brought a photobooth with her to document the event. She asked Jay if they could take some photos together, and the booth, a digital machine labeled “Photo ID New Generation,” was wheeled out.



The first thing Leno says is “Oh, this is a real old-time one, isn’t it?” No Jay, it’s actually the exact opposite of a real old-time photobooth. Nevermind, though; he’s just using that line to set up the “joke” he’s about to unleash next: “You know how I can tell the old-time ones?” And then, pointing to the sample photos on the outside of the booth, he says, “They’re all white kids.” After he’s done laughing at his own joke, everyone’s favorite Jay Leno tick, he follows it with “See apparently, Hispanic and Black people didn’t have photographs back then.” 

It’s hard to know where to begin with this. First, hopefully Leno realizes he’s actually making the joke at the expense of the manufacturer of the modern-day booth, who doesn’t have the excuse that a manufacturer in the 1950s might have had to keep all of the people in the sample photos white. Secondly, it’s clear that “old-time” photobooths, in their heyday, provided a valuable opportunity for people of all races and socio-economic backgrounds to have a photo of themselves and their loved ones, without the expense of a camera or studio portrait. I realize no one is looking to Leno for historical accuracy or insightful observations about photography and society, but it needed pointing out. After the commercial, Curtis mentions that she’ll keep the photostrip as a “keepsake, forever and ever.” Too bad the digital print, which doesn’t look too good to begin with, will be faded by then. Maybe she should have brought in a real photoboooth.

Taking a look at their website, it seems Photo-Me is now Foto-Mat. Outside the U.S., Photo-Me is still Photo-Me, and it looks like the branding transition is still in progress, as the name “Photo-Me” still pops up throughout Foto-Mat’s website. Thanks to Anthony for the tip.

While it’s 99% tedious photos of ‘tweens mugging for the camera in an Apple Store, our RSS feed for Flickr photos tagged with the word ‘photobooth’ still manages to turn up some interesting pictures every once in awhile. Last week, I spotted what looked like a photobooth photo blown up to cover the side of a building, and in contacting the artist, I was happy to find out more about the project, and others like it that he’s been working on over the years.



Pierre Fraenkel’s work often involves the public presentation of found photos, blown up to varying degrees of massiveness. As he describes his latest project, “Unknown little boy,”

I made a collage of an unknown little boy’s ID photograph. In my collages, I very often like showing people I meet, but above all, I like showing unknown people — either old photographs from a flea market or an antique shop, or an ID photograph found on the ground.

I’m fond of the slightly strained and forced smile of the kid. And then, there’s this hand — whose hand is it? His mother’s? From his clothes and his haircut as well as the quality of the photo, I would say the photograph was taken at the end of the 70s.

The project was done for the 2009 KKO Festival in Altkirch, France, and since we first saw the photo, the boy has now been joined by an unknown girl, as well. We’ve got some more info in our Projects section, and much more can be found on Pierre’s website.

UPDATE: For the Francophones among our readers, a local TV news interview story about the project.

We received an email with photos from a couple named Peter and Ina in the Netherlands a few weeks ago, and it’s taken me this long just to recover from the shock of seeing their gorgeous photobooth in all its original glory. This gem may be the best-looking booth I’ve ever seen.



Thanks to Peter and Ina for sharing the booth, just one item in their amazing collection of games, jukeboxes, and other machines. Here’s Ina’s account of how they came across it:

About twelve years ago, when I saw this thing for the first time, it was love at first sight for me. The photobooth was in a jukebox store in Amstelveen in the Netherlands, and I had never seen something like it before. Unfortunately, my husband didn’t see in it what I saw, so in spite of all the hints I gave him over the years, the booth stayed where it was: in the jukebox store.

The asking price was rather high and this booth also takes a lot of space, so there weren’t many people seriously interested and the guys who owned the photobooth didn’t sell it. 

Because the owners wanted to quit their business, they put a lot of stuff on sale, and that’s why, after all those years, I was delighted to get it as a Christmas present last Christmas. And above all…for a more than reasonable price.

My husband made me really glad and believe it or not, by now he almost likes it more than I do. The condition of the booth is rather great so we don’t have to restore it and as far as we can see, the mechanisms also work well. Now we are trying to find out what chemicals we need to actually make it work again and I think, with the hope of a couple of handy friends, this will work out.

We’ll post any news we get on the progress of the booth as it comes in.

In the run-up to the Photobooth Convention, we had to put a few stories and bits of news on the back burner while we were in Chicago. Now that the dust has settled, it’s time to get those up on the site, and we’re starting with a show that opened more than 1500 miles away from Chicago on the same night as the opening of the Convention: Picture Yourself Here: The Photobooth Show at the Flagstaff Photography Center in Flagstaff, Arizona.



The show, which runs through June 13, is a look at the photostrip collection amassed over the course of the past two years by FPC’s managing director, Jason Hasenbank. Described as “part self-portrait show, part anonymous found object, part candid look at the residents and visitors to downtown Flagstaff,” the show features a collection of “over 2,000 individual images of portraits, body parts, inanimate objects and expressions from our emotional spectrum.” Visitors are encouraged to add their own photos to the collection, and the center offers a scanning and enlarging service to allow people to share the photostrips with family and friends

We’re awaiting a photo of the booth and a sample photostrip to add the Flagstaff Photography Center’s booth to our newly-revamped Photobooth Directory. Thanks to Jason at the FPC for letting us know about the event.

UPDATE: The Flagstaff Photography Center’s booth is now listed in our directory.

So, it’s been a week or so since it ended, and the 2009 International Photobooth Convention is retreating in our collective rear view mirror. Those attendees who made the trek from the U.K., from New York and San Francisco, from Vermont and Massachusetts, from Minnesota and Ohio, and from around the greater Chicago area, have all returned home. The organizers have left Logan Square for far flung Los Angeles, St Louis, and Oak Park, and it’s time to reflect on what went on during the night and long day of the event.

From my perspective, the event was a huge success. Thanks to the hard work of a lot of people, not the least of whom were Anthony, providing his photobooths and preparing the event on the ground in Chicago; Tim, bringing in folks from all over the country and keeping things under control with his unflappable cool; and our hosts at Center Portion Sheila and Greg, we had a smooth and relatively chaos-free event. Without any major issues to worry about, we were able to appreciate the company of the photobooth enthusiasts, technicians, artists, kids, and passersby who attended, all enjoying the shared experience and the luxury of unlimited photobooth pictures.

Some of the highlights for me were first of all meeting Anthony, with whom we’d corresponded and spoken over the previous few months, since the idea of a convention in Chicago was first floated last August. Tim and I had been involved in our first International Photobooth Convention in 2005, just a few months after we’d begun this site, so this time around, I felt a lot more comfortable in the world of the photobooth, and had made a lot more connections, discoveries, and acquaintances that proved helpful in the meantime .

One such connection was with Martin of Schnellfoto.ru, who had gotten in touch through the website a few weeks before the convention and offered a collaborative project for convention-goers in Chicago to participate in. In the Schnellfoto booth in Moscow, various people offered questions to Chicagoans, written in Russian on cards and held up to the camera in the photobooth. Martin FedEx’ed the strips, with translations, to me, and I brought them to Chicago, where we distributed them to people to answer with a response photostrip. The project attracted a lot of enthusiasm, and we got some terrific, witty, and creative answers. I’m in the middle of assembling a small booklet of the questions and answers side by side, which we’ll make available on the site when I’m finished.



Steve “Mixup” Howard, the founding father of the International Photobooth Convention, made the trek from England, and, along with Nakki Goranin and Dina Stander, made up the core group of returnees from our previous convention in 2005. It was great to see them again, and to have their art and collections hanging on the walls of the gallery, just like last time. We made some new friends this time, putting faces with names we’d emailed with over the years, including Danny Minnick from San Francisco; Connie Begg, proud owner of a new (old) photobooth, also from the Bay Area; and Carole and Siobhan of Photomovette in London, who are busy preparing to reintroduce the photochemical booth to London after a few years of painful absence.



The panel discussion on day two was also a highlight, as Tim led a talk among the hosts and distinguished guests, including Anthony, Mixup, Nakki, and Nick Osborn of SquareAmerica.com and co-author of the fantastic new book Who We Were: A Snapshot History of America.

Despite the long series of late nights spent preparing, enjoying, and then cleaning up after the convention, we were even able to get in a little photobooth-hunting, as Tim, Danny, and I hit three photobooths to add to our directory: Quenchers, Weegee’s Lounge, and Bar Deville. By the end of it all, there was fleeting talk of doing it all again in a year (or two or three), so we’ll see what happens. Thanks to everyone who came for making it a terrific event.

Check out the official wrap-up page for the convention, and stay tuned for the online gallery of artwork and other multimedia from the event.