Thanks to some new-found success locating old TV shows and some helpful contributions from readers, we’ve been making steady progress adding to the growing body of photobooth knowledge and information over the past few weeks.

First, from our contributors, two western American photobooths we’ve long heard of but haven’t had the chance to visit: the great old booth at Arcade Amusements in Manitou Springs, Colorado, seen at right. It’s one of those booths that’s been at its location “forever,” and we’re glad it’s still working.

Second, we received a report and photos from a Model 20A at

Stellar Pizza, Ale, & Cocktails, located in Seattle, adding to that city’s impressive tally of photochemical photobooths.

In the world of TV, we’ve added a few obscure and international shows over the last few weeks, including two British shows: an episode of “Midsomer Murders” and one from the BBC’s “The Smoking Room,” seen here:



On the domestic front, we’ve finally been able to get images from two long-standing photobooths-on-TV rumors: first, we’ve got Scooby-Doo, Dick van Dyke, and a photobooth, as the gang visits a “Haunted Carnival” (what else?). And finally, we’ve watched it so you don’t have to: an episode of “Power Rangers in Space” which lifts the “superhero caught changing from mild-mannered alter ego in a photobooth” plotline from Superman III.

As we continue to catalog the history of photobooths, the photos they produce, and the way people viewed, displayed, and shared those photos, we’ve come across some interesting items on eBay.



This beautiful deco frame, made to perfectly fit one photobooth photo, held a beautiful hand-tinted photo of a woman in a hat and fur. After it arrived, I noticed that another piece of paper seemed to be sitting behind the photo, and when I pulled it out, I discovered that it was another photo from the same strip. I pulled out the original photo, and discovered two more photos, as well, making what seemed to be the complete strip. None of the other three photos are tinted.

The corners of each photo are worn enough that I can’t be sure they all came from the same strip; they could be the chosen four from two sittings done one after the other, but either way, it was an excellent unadvertised surprise.

Big news in the photoboooth world, as Photo-Me International has sold off its American division, Reuters reports:

Photo-Me, which operates about 21,000 photo booths in railway stations, airports and shopping centres, said the sale of Auto Photo Systems Inc and its unit, Photo-Me USA LLC., would yield a small exceptional profit.

Photo-Me shares gained 13 percent to 13.25 pence at 0928 GMT, valuing the entire firm at about 48 million pounds.

No financial details were provided, but Photo-Me said the U.S. business, which operated 250 photobooths, or about 1 percent of its group total, made a pre-tax loss of 700,000 pounds ($1.39 million) on revenues of 1.2 million pounds in the fiscal year just ended.

Jean-Claude Perrottey, a former employee of Photo-Me, bought the business, the company said.

“The USA has always been a limited market for ID photography and US vending has tended to be loss-making in recent years,” Photo-Me said in the statement.

We’ll see what this means for the 250 booths (a number that’s new to us) in the U.S. operated by Photo-Me. Thanks to Gary for the tip on this. 

We’ve got a lot of photobooth news to get off our desks and into the archive, so we’re putting it all together into one mega-post. First, we start with a video interview on MTV.com with Sub Pop’s vice president, Megan Jasper, as she gives a tour of the offices, including their in-house photobooth, not far from the soda machine that dispenses 75¢ Rainier beer. Nice. We’ve mentioned their booth before, and you can also check out more bands in the photobooth on their blog.

Secondly, we heard from Jeff from Comedy Photobooth, who let us know about the videos of comedians telling jokes inside photobooths — and if you were curious, all of the videos are shot inside photochemical booths. We’ve got the site listed in our Projects section now, and we’ll watch as it grows.

We’ve neglected to mention the ubiquitous Tonight Show “phony photobooth,” a series of videos which show unwitting photobooth-goers being freaked out by a talking photobooth, but it’s out there, and everyone seems to have seen it. Along those lines, we came across another photobooth prank video, in which a woman in a photobooth asks passersby to hold articles of her clothing, and it becomes apparent she’s taking off all her clothes in the booth. The clip seems to have originated on a Fox reality show called “Sexy Cam” (anyone ever heard of it? No? Didn’t think so), and the booth setting looks suspiciously like a mall in Canada.

And speaking of Canada, on an altogether much more interesting note, we caught word of a show in Vancouver called “Requiem for a Photobooth: 3 punk bands, 4 shots, 1 minute of silence,” by the artist Femke van Delft. More information on the project can be found on her site, and on this local blog. The show seems to have ended this past week, and we welcome any more information and first-hand reports on what it was like.

In late 2007, we received an email from director Graham Rathlin, who was working on a short film set in a photobooth and needed a real booth to shoot it in. We helped get him in touch with the folks who manage Berlin’s fine booths, and a few months later, he sent us a link to his finished short, titled Little Snaps of Horror. You can view the film on icewhole.com.

And finally, from the Coincidence Department, we’ve got two “About Us” pages from Chicago-based organizations that use photobooth photos. Now, we know that Chicago is America’s photobooth capital, but even this is a little strange.

First, from skinnyCorp, the folks behind the phenomenon that is Threadless, a page featuring a number of shots from the same booth, which you can see on their site and archived here.

And secondly, the Neo-Futurists’ Ensemble and Alumni page (archived in our Web section), featuring dozens of black and white photobooth photos of past and current members of this Chicago theater collective.

News from Reuters and The Press Association this week of Photo-Me’s continued woes — the company’s stock, which lost 84% of its value in the last year, fell 6 percent more this week — but they are hoping for “one-digit solid profitable growth” next year, in the words of CEO Thierry Barel.

As for the news of more losses, an analyst offered this choice quote:

“The results were just what we were looking for… The photo-booth business just throws off money.”

Hmm. That doesn’t sound good. The Reuters article continues, “[Barel] had considered selling the core vending business, which is suffering as passport agencies move to centralised biometric data collection, but the board had received no acceptable offers.” The failed sale led to losses totalling “£14.8 million of one-off items.” We previously covered Photo-Me’s attempts to sell off its photobooth division in 2006 and 2007.

Barel continued, “There is a risk of further deterioration in photo booths… We decided to accelerate diversification to depend less and less on photo booths.” So, if the booth business “throws off money,” passport agencies are moving away from accepting photobooth photos for identification, and no other companies are interested in buying Photo-Me’s photobooth division, what happens next? What does the future hold for the the thousands of photobooths around the world owned by Photo-Me? 

One person who might have an answer is Hugo Swire, the news chairman of Photo-Me, who is profiled in a recent piece in the Telegraph that is definitely worth a read. 

We continue Photomaton Week here at Photobooth.net (don’t worry, it’s unofficial, you didn’t miss the announcement) with a spectacular trove of French photographic history. Thanks to a Google Alert pointing out a post on Dinosaurs and Robots, we found this group of photos that fits right in with the renaissance (nice) of the Parisian photobooth: an amazing set of more than 150 photobooth shots from the 1930s — 1950s, all featuring the friendly face of Willy Michel, Photomaton’s man in Paris during that time.

Titled “Aux origines du Photomaton,” the set of photos features faces that will be familiar to fans of the films of Melville, Clouzot, and Renoir, as well as some other recognizable faces, including a young Errol Flynn, Bing Crosby, Erich von Stroheim (wow!) and Arthur Rubenstein. Almost more fascinating than the faces of the actors are the faces of Michel, sometimes eerily consistent from photo to photo, but also greatly changed over the decades the photos were taken. It’s worth the time it takes to flip through all of these priceless photos, each a testament to the enduring power of the photobooth to capture a genuine, spontaneous moment in time.

Willy Michel and Charles Boyer from Aux origines du Photomaton.

It’s safe to say that for many of our younger readers, the 2001 film Amélie is one of the first things that comes to mind when they think of photobooths, or at least provides one of the strongest associations they have with photobooths, living as we do in a time that is somewhere on the downhill side of the “golden age” of the photochemical photobooth.

The thought that as the film was being released, photochemical photobooths had completely disappeared from Metro stations and street corners in Paris, seemed like a cruel irony indeed: the film captured a moment in time that no longer existed. But thanks to Ole, Dorothée, Eddy, and everyone else at Photoautomat, Paris is once again home to a black and white, photochemical photobooth.

The photobooth, located at the Palais de Tokyo along the Seine, has been in place since late 2007, and is now listed in our directory.

They’ve recently installed another photobooth in Paris, at the Point Ephemere, which we’ll list as soon as we get the photos.

Perhaps it’s time to start an “Outdoor Advertising” section here on Photobooth.net. More and more TV shows are using photobooth-themed ads on buildings, buses, and so on, including the Ellen Degeneres Show, advertised on the side of a Warner Bros. studio building in Burbank, California:

Our friend and contributor Klaas Dierks has organized an exhibition of photobooth photos at a gallery in Hamburg. The show, called “Wait until Dry — Identities out of the Booth” brings together the photobooth photo collections of three artists, and opens next week.

The artists Irina Ruppert, Sven Heckmann and Klaas Dierks have collected thousands of photobooth pictures for years and present a selection of them at the „Raum für Photographie” (room for photography) in Hamburg, Germany, from the 5th of June to the 3rd of July 2008. The photos on exhibition were made in photobooths between 1928 and 1988 and originate from all over the world. 

By combining the photos across time and place, the artists instill new meaning in their objects trouvée and let the imagination wander.

Raum für Photographie
Kampstrasse 8
Open Thursday through Saturday 12.00 — 19.30 pm
20357 Hamburg
www.raum-fuer-photographie.de

We encourage our readers in the area to attend and let us know what they see, and we’ll be posting photos from the show courtesy of Klaas next month. 

Photobooths have been popping up all over the place in the advertising world lately, and we’re doing our best to keep up with the trend. A few recent additions follow: first, a brief shot of some blown-up photostrips of Ellen Degeneres in a commercial for American Express.



Next, a promotion from Coppertone sun block featuring what they call the “DermaPhoto Booth,” a portable booth that takes a photo of your face that reveals hidden damage to your skin caused by the sun. The booth will be traveling around the country this summer, so you may have a chance to get your DermaPhoto taken and see the scary results.



Today, I caught an ad for E! Entertainment television featuring personalities from their upcoming shows at a carnival, taking part in various activities including posing in the photobooth:



And finally, CBS has been promoting its show “Two and a Half Men” with some ubiquitous bus banners on Metro buses all around Los Angeles; thanks to Aimee for catching this one with her camera: