We’ve finally made the leap to the latest version of Movable Type after making do with a version from two years ago for far too long. Let us know if you see anything odd as we try to make sure everything is still working as it should.
It’s been a little quiet here on the blog as we’ve been hard at work behind the scenes preparing for some changes and events in 2009. Check back on Monday for an announcement about what we’ve been planning, and if you’re a photobooth enthusiast, block off some time in early April. It’s been awhile since our last International Photobooth Convention, hasn’t it?
Happy to find a photobooth-related event in Southern California, I ventured to the Santa Monica Airport this afternoon, armed with a stack of Photobooth.net postcards, to attend the second annual Vernacular Photography Fair, which we noted here a few days ago. The event, held in a gallery space at the Santa Monica Art Studios, consisted of ten dealers from around the country who specialize in “found photography, anonymous imagery or snapshot photography,” as well as hundreds of photography enthusiasts browsing, buying, and talking photos.
I was happy to make the acquaintance of Babbette Hines, whose book Photobooth was one of the inspirations that helped launch this site more than four years ago. We had a nice conversation about the joys of photobooth photos, and commiserated about the recent upswing in prices that have made collecting them less affordable than it used to be.
I also enjoyed meeting a number of other folks, including dealers Myles Haselhorst of Ampersand Vintage in Portland, Leonard Lightfoot of Vernacular Visions, John Nichols of the Santa Paula Snapshot Museum, as well as the folks who put together the event. I’m hoping Photobooth.net can be more involved next time; I could see a lot of interesting ways to collaborate. Two years after moving here, it’s great to finally get a little more involved in the vintage photography scene. Thanks to everyone at D3 Projects for putting this together.
We’ve posted images from the 1929 Harold Lloyd comedy Welcome Danger, which, along with Lonesome (noted here last month), is one of the earliest films we’ve found yet that features a photobooth. In Welcome Danger, the machine is more of an automatic photo machine without the booth, but the principle is the same, and once again, the photo taken by the machine plays an integral part in the plot of the film.
When a photo taken by Billie (Barbara Kent, who also played Mary in Lonesome) fails to come out of the machine, she walks away. A moment later, Harold (Harold Lloyd) approaches the machine, sits for his photo, and once it has arrived, places it on the drying stand for a moment. After replacing his hat, he looks at the photo and finds that it is a sort of movie fantasy double exposure, with his and Billie’s images neatly superimposed next to one another. He becomes smitten with the girl in his photo, and, as the stills from the film show, he eventually tracks her down.
We now have films featuring photobooths from every decade of the photobooth’s history, the 1920s to the present, missing only one: the 1930s. I’m hoping some eagle-eyed fans of ’30s musicals are keeping their eyes peeled for photobooth appearances. if you spot something please let us know.
This weekend in Santa Monica, California, D3Projects, in conjunction with a variety of dealers, artists, and other groups, is presenting their second annual Vernacular Photography Fair, an event which should be of interest to all photobooth fans in Southern California.
In the press release on their website, D3 describe the event as “Two days of vernacular photography, featuring top dealers nationwide — photos & books for sale.”
Vernacular photography — also known as found photography, anonymous imagery or snapshot photography — is a genre of photography making its way into the spotlight of fine art. Artists, collectors and dealers rediscover photographs estranged from their owners and lost in time at flea markets, estate and yard sales, attics and even in abandoned boxes on the street. The new owners of these photographs give them a new life and relevance in the world today.
Found photographs, anonymous images and snapshots from the 20s until the late 70s will be offered for show and for sale to the public by the following art dealers: Jane Handel, Leonard Lightfoot, Ray Hetrick, Babbette Hines, Diane Meyer, Carl Mautz, John Nichols, Desiree Dreeuws, Ron Slattery and Myles Haselhorst.
We’ll be attending and look forward to meeting other photobooth and found photo enthusiasts. We’ll have a report on the event next week.
Happy 2009 from Photobooth.net. We’ve got some big plans in store for the year ahead, which is somehow our fifth year of existence, unbelievably enough. For now, we’ve got a few bits of news from around the web and around our site to bring to you today.
The last days of MTV’s TRL Photobooth are documented on MTV.com
A weekly photobooth contest is held at Orlando’s Bar B Q Bar (from which we still have no listing… Central Florida, I’m talking to you):
It is a known fact that BBQ has the best photo booth. Sure, others have tried, but nothing comes close to this oldie but goodie. Set in the perfect little nook of the bar, complete with a flamingo and a snowman within reach for that rare moment of impromptu posing, this photo booth is the one all the others in Orlando wish to be. Many of my hard earned dollars have been fed into this ‘lil beauty and I am always happy with the result.
We added a page of photobooth photos from the Kills (right), the most photobooth-obsessed band we know.
Also new, some interesting photobooth art, minus the photos, as it were.
Mark Miller was kind enough to send us some samples of his elaborate yearly family photobooth project, which he’s done for more than a decade using Chicago-area photochemical photobooths.
Photobooth artist and collector Rolf Behme now has a profile on the site; check out his work at his website.
And finally, a very strange indeed photobooth sequence from the old “Mission Impossible” TV show from Mozinor in France. I’m not really sure what’s going on, but the photos we see are altered and augmented with different people throughout the clip. You’ll need to watch it to really get it.
For a few years now, we’ve been keeping our eyes out for images from Paul Fejos’ seminal silent film Lonesome, the story of a man and woman who meet, fall in love, become separated, and finally reunited, all in the same day. I’d had a tip from our friend Klaas that the film had a photobooth sequence in it, and finally had a chance to see the film a few years ago, but just this month, I’ve finally managed to get ahold of some images from the film to add to our list the film that has, to my knowledge, the earliest appearance of a photobooth in cinema.
The photobooth, labeled “Auto Photo,” produces a single photo in a circular disc, a product that a number of different photobooth companies were providing at the time. The photo is produced nearly instantaneously in the film, creating a precedent that nearly every film since has followed, as editors ignore the photochemical reality and show the photostrips appearing just seconds after the photos were taken. Lonesome also sets the pattern for the use of the photobooth photo in the narrative structure of the film. First, it is a symbol of the love the two share, a memento of Coney Island, where they met. Later in the film, when they’ve become separated, both Mary and Jim use their photos of each other to show a carnival worker, asking if he’s seen their lost love. And finally, at the end of the film, Jim pulls out his tiny photo of Mary and looks at it longingly, convinced that he has lost the girl he fell in love with that day.
Look at the still images from the film to get a better sense of how the images fit into the movie as a whole. And if you ever have a chance to see the film screened — prints do circulate, both in the United States and Europe — I recommend it highly, not just for the photobooth sequence, but for its compelling and magical artistry. It really is silent cinema at its best.
A weekend visit to San Diego was a bit of a disappointment in terms of functioning photochemical photobooths out in the wild, but it wasn’t a complete loss. First, the bad news: the photobooth at the Corvette Diner has indeed been replaced with a digital booth, and the photobooths at the Waterfront, U 31 and the Ruby Room are all digital. The two photobooths at the Museum of Photographic Arts in Balboa Park are still there, but both were out of order during my visit. The photobooth at the Beauty Bar is also no longer there, which leaves a pretty poor verdict for real photobooths in San Diego. If anyone knows of any we’ve missed, please let us know; we’d love to hear some good news.
The saving grace of our visit was a chance to see photographer Tim Mantoani’s beautiful Model 9 photobooth, which lives in his San Diego studio and is occasionally used for photo shoots and parties.
Tim was kind enough to take time out of his holiday weekend to meet me and let me have a look at the booth — it’s a real beauty, in great working order, and is complete with the top sign, two different sets of advertising inserts for the wraparounds, and the operating manuals.
We first came across Tim’s work in early 2005, when we noted his photobooth-like photoshoot for the 2005 Pro Bowl in Sports Illustrated. We’ve been in touch since, and were happy to have the opportunity to see his photobooth in person. Thanks again, Tim.
We’ve also made a few new additions to our Movies & TV section:
First, filling in a gap in the decades for the 1950s (we now have booth appearances in every decade from the 1920s to the present, save the 1930s…and I know there’s got to be a ’30s musical with a booth out there somewhere…), we’ve got Vincente Minnelli’s The Band Wagon, starring Fred Astaire, Cyd Charisse, and, briefly, a Photomatic photobooth.
Gus Van Sant is in the news thanks to his recent release Milk, Nicole Kidman for her turn in Australia, and Joaquin Phoenix for vowing to be done with acting; once upon a time, they were all working together, in a photobooth, in To Die For.
Further back, we added scenes from a Swedish ski vacation comedy, Snowroller, a Hong Kong shoot-’em-up called Fong juk, Robert Altman’s classic interpretation of the Philip Marlowe story The Long Goodbye, and Agnes Varda’s gritty story of a roaming vagabond, Sans toit ni loi. Four more different films it would be challenging to find, but they all share a photobooth in common.
On the television front, we’ve also had some recent additions: first, some TV shows that feature pseudo-photostrips in their opening credit sequences, The Ex List and ‘Til Death.
Thanks to Klaas, we also added an old episode of the now-defunct Charmed, and thanks to Stephanie, a first-season episode of Pushing Daisies. Another new TV season also seems to always bring a photostrip appearance in a pilot episode; this year it’s The Mentalist.
The Baltimore Sun features a story today about two unlikely friends who met as rookies at the Baltimore Colts training camp in 1955: Raymond Berry, who would win Super Bowls with the Colts and later coach the Patriots to one in 1985, and Leroy Vaughn, who would leave football after a season and become best known as the father of a baseball MVP, Mo Vaughn. They reconnected after 50 years when Berry rediscovered the photo in his belongings. They had taken the photo during their rookie year in the league.
Back then, racism was still rampant in America. Had the picture been taken in the deep South — had a white man and a black man entered a coin-operated photo booth, shared the single stool and closed the curtain — there would have been hell to pay.
But it was during a road trip to Chicago or New York that two first-year players stepped into a Woolworth’s, spent a quarter and forged their friendship on a wallet-sized keepsake.
The photograph featured in the article is definitely a Photomatic, looking at its tell-tale frame, with Berry appearing slightly out of focus for sitting too close to the lens. It’s a great, evocative photo, even if we had no idea who the men were or what their story was.
Last year, when Berry finally tracked him down, Vaughn was stunned to hear his voice.
I was tickled to death to get the call,” Vaughn said from his home in Virginia. “We’re going to get together [soon] this summer, to sit around and reminisce.”
Berry, for one, can’t wait.
“It’s been a long, long time,” he said. “I think we’ll probably laugh a lot.”
Surely they will record their friendship again.
Said Vaughn: “We’ll find one of those old photo booths and have another picture taken — 53 years later.”
Well, gentlemen, you know where to come to find your nearest “old photo booth” location, so good luck!
Photomatic photo, Raymond Berry and baltimoresun.com
From a Gothamist piece this week we learn that MTV is finally shutting down TRL, a.k.a Total Request Live, that staple of the early millennial teen zeitgeist, and the reason America got to know Carson Daly, for better or worse.
TRL’s photobooth, an honest-to-goodness photochemical booth in the land of digital everything, produced thousands of strips commemorating the visits of musicians, actors, athletes, and all-purpose celebrities, many of which were cataloged in the 2002 book TRL Photobooth. Pick up a copy of the book to check out the photos, or browse through the ones collected online at MTV.com.
Our question now is, “Where are those photostrips going?” Hopefully, they’ll end up saved in the MTV archive, or put on display in another MTV building, but let’s hope they don’t get tossed out with the set.
“TRL photobooth wall” photo by Jen Carlson, Gothamist.com