Ever since reading about San Francisco’s photobooths in a 2002 San Francisco Chronicle article as I was beginning my photobooth hunt, I’ve thought of the city as a photobooth haven. Never mind the fact that one of the locations in the article had a Polaroid booth and another location had gone digital by the time I was able to check it out, or that the author mysteriously recommends photobooth enthusiasts watch La Dolce Vita (great movie, nothing to do with photobooths) along with Amélie… On a quick weekend trip to San Francisco, we were able to add five booths to the list, check in on some old stand-bys, and confirm some cases where digital booths had taken over.

First, I’ll list a few notes on research done before the trip, based on a few years of mentions, rumors, tips, phone calls, and Flickr evidence (and please feel free to correct if you know otherwise).

• The photobooth at the Elbo Room is digital.
• The photobooth at Seventh Heart was photochemical, but has been gone since February, 2007.
• Treat Street is now Dirty Thieves, and seems to still have a photobooth, but people describe it as “Polaroidesque,” so who knows…
• Jungle Fun & Adventure doesn’t exist in San Francisco anymore.
• My Trick Pony’s booth was photochemical, and “died” in April, 2007.
• Studio Z seems dead; Fat City seems to have taken over, but do they have a photobooth?
• The booth at the 500 Club is a Polaroid booth (as of June, 2007).
• The Cellar doesn’t have a photobooth, and claims not to have had one.
• Studio Z is closed, so that one’s out, too.

Now, for the the run-down: my first stop was at Notte, on Union Street in Cow Hollow. The booth was there all right, but it wasn’t working that night, so I snapped a photo of it, to the annoyance of those in the roped-off section in the back where the booth lived, and moved on. I headed over to The Comet Club, where I’d heard there was a booth, but it was a digital one, so I headed back to the hotel.

The next morning, we headed down to the Embarcadero, and along to the Musee Mecanique at Pier 45. Both black and white booths are still there, and I had a nice chat with the man behind it all, Dan Zelinsky, who helped us out with a finicky bill acceptor and told us about his massive collection of abandoned photostrips. We took a few sets of photos, happy see that these great booths are still in action.

Later on that afternoon, I headed west to the Haight to check out a photobooth at Wasteland, a clothing store on Haight Street.The photobooth is located in the rear of the store, and is apparently used as a dressing room on occasion, as a sign inside the booth testifies. The booth provided very crisp black and white images with a clean white border, and in was good running order.

From Wasteland it was a little over a mile to the Buckshot Bar and Gameroom (which unfortunately comes up as “Buckshop” on Google Maps and has no website), where I stopped in just as they opened to test out their black and white booth. The booth had all of the right elements: photos of dogs, photos of bar-goers in various stages of undress, a half-dressed mannequin and a goose on top of the booth, and a Farrah Fawcett poster on the side. I tried to complete the scene by downing a beer in between the four flashes, and did pretty well, but the camera seemed a little cock-eyed in the booth, and didn’t capture my nearly-empty glass as I held it up. When the photos came out, not only were the sepia and nearly overrun with white border, but image they captured included the light from outside and not much of the entire right half of the seating area. Strange indeed.

After dinner on Valencia Street, we checked out the San Francisco location of The Beauty Bar, an unassuming little place with a few hair salon-style dryers above the seats and some related paraphernalia on the walls. The photobooth took some solid, if a little dark, black and white photos, but the mechanism could use a little adjustment, it seems: our photostrip received a half-inch gash in the top frame on its way out.



On Sunday morning, before heading to the airport, I made one more stop: the RayKo Photo Center, not far from SFMOMA and the Moscone Center on Third Street. Michael Shindler’s beautiful 1947 Model 9 booth sits at the far side of the front area of the building, all gleaming metal and curved walls. The booth wasn’t working that day, but I had a nice chat with Michael about it, and Ann showed me some of the many photostrips the booth has produced, plastered on the walls. I poked around inside the booth and took a bunch of photos. I look forward to a return trip where I can see the booth in action.

Almost all of the photobooth locations I didn’t have a chance to check out this time around are in a pretty small area, which would make a good night’s work for a Photobooth.net reader. These aren’t all confirmed locations, but are places I was going to check out out if I had time: Annie’s Social Club, The Transfer, The Endup, Cassidy’s Bar, Club Six, and Thee Parkside Cafe. Let us know what you find…

More European photobooth news this week, as we’ve belatedly posted a little information about a recent project undertaken by Sleep Club, a.k.a. artists Dell Stewart and Adam Cruickshank, at Takt Gallery in Berlin. Simply put, they

…made some flocked Schlaf Klub tshirts and wore them while we slept in six different Photoautomats in Berlin. We took a lot of pictures and made this little installation as a result.

Check out more pictures of the beautiful and gigantic blown-up photostrips on their website. Thanks to Adam for letting us know about the project.

We’re continually struggling against the tide of New Yorkers here at Photobooth.net West, never quite reaching that magic place where we’re ready for the newest issue when it comes, so it took until this week to make it to the December 24 & 31, 2007, issue. The Books article, titled “Visual Trophies,” by John Updike, focuses on the history of snapshots in America, which he describes through a review of the book The Art of the American Snapshot 1888–1978, the catalog for an exhibition of the same name at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.



It’s an interesting piece, and the exhibition and catalog sound intriguing for anyone with an interest in the history of photography as told through amateur, vernacular, anonymous photos. Somewhat strangely, though wonderfully, the article is illustrated with a half-page photo of a beautiful old photobooth, photographed by Harvey Stein, with a woman’s bare legs visible where the curtain should be. Below the large photo are five smaller portraits: four photobooth photos and one photo which might typically be called a snapshot. While we were excited to see photobooths so prominently featured, the article has precious little to do with photobooths at all, and we were left wanting a little more. 

Updike follows the history of the snapshot as it is laid out in the book, and when dealing with writer Sarah Kennel’s section on 1920–1939 (titled “Quick, Casual, Modern”), he describes the way the easy-to-use cameras that were becoming commonplace at this time made all sorts of photos possible:

A number of somewhat racy exposures hint at the camera’s significant role as a de-inhibitor, an enabler of what Kennel calls “home-grown pornography.” Nudes in provocative poses were among the earliest fruits of big-box, slow-tech photography in the mid-nineteenth century; something about the camera’s impassive appropriation of whatever is set before it invites, like a psychoanalyst’s silence, self-exposure.

He then quotes from Nakki Goranin’s upcoming book American Photobooth, in which she describes the way photobooth users were “stripping off their clothes for the private photobooth camera.” This is, obviously, an important observation and an interesting indicator of the power of the photobooth and the sense of privacy it gave to those who used it, but by bringing up this passage as evidence of the way the simple new cameras liberated amateur photographers, Updike glosses over the fundamental differences between a photobooth and a camera used by a typical consumer at the time. A photobooth creates no negatives, and those women taking off their clothes and couples getting adventuresome in the booth were safe so long as the curtain stayed closed. Once their photos came out of the booth, they had all of the evidence, but for amateur shutterbugs who wanted to get a little racy, there was still the shame of sending the photos away to be processed by Kodak or dealing with the knowing glances of a drugstore photo counter employee. For an entire article about amateur photography, it seems odd to base a point around the way photobooth photography works, as well as to illustrate the piece with photobooth photos. Photobooth photography sits somewhere between amateur photography, studio photography, and automation, and it seems that the distinction between snapshots and photobooth photos still needs to be made a little more clearly. 

Photos: Top © Harvey Stein. Bottom 1, 4, and 5: Nakki Goranin; 2 J.F.K. Library; 3 Collection of Robert E. Jackson.

The eighty-year history of the photobooth is filled with little detours and fascinating stories; one of those that has just come to our attention recently is the history of the Phototeria.

Thanks to photography historian George Dunbar, we can now learn about the story of David McCowan and his Phototeria, a late 1920s photobooth that placed a single photograph onto a photosensitive metallic disk. Dunbar tells the story in his article “The Phototeria — A Canadian Invention” in the most recent issue of Photographic Canadiana, the journal of The Photographic Historical Society of Canada.

Thanks to George for letting us know about his article, and for his permission to post the PDF on Photobooth.net and let our readers learn about it.

Phototeria photo by George Dunbar

That’s certainly not a word, but I’m sick of using the term “roundup” to describe one of these omnibus photobooth news entries. Maybe I should have just used “omnibus,” actually. Anyway, we’ve found a few brief items of note to relay here, and in the new year, we’ll have more news on the photobooth art front from Spain and Italy. 

• One item that has been circulating the art news blogs recently tells of the work of Joe Heidecker, who used a photobooth to help him cover chairs in photos of design fair goers in Miami. Read all about it on the Dwell blog, and be sure to check out the “Design Miami 2007” video on the New York Times website.

• Max Kozloff’s new history of portrait photography features some photobooth photos, according to a Guardian review:

Kozloff favours anonymous faces and everyday locations: he makes room for discarded strips of photo booth portraits, but not for the celebrated sitters of Karsh, Bailey, Leibovitz or Testino.

• According to a recent LAist post, musician and artist (and photobooth photo collector) Mark Mothersbaugh’s “Rugs During Wartime and Peacetime” exhibition and sale at a gallery in Culver City, California, featured a booth:

They had the requisite trendy photo booth, which we avoided. Everyone’s butt looks fat standing in a photo booth. 

• Photobooth.net reader DaveX’s giant gallery of photostrips shows the wide variety of lighting, contrast, and chemical variables that can have an effect on the final strip. And if you’re into seeing the owner of that same photobooth mugging for the camera, take a look at the gallery of 357 photostrips of the owner, also impressive and fascinating.

More bad financial news for Photo-Me is not necessarily noteworthy, but the field day the UK press are having with headlines is somewhat amusing. 

While the Independent goes with the mundane “Photo-Me stock dives 8 per cent after warning it will go into the red,” In the News and the BBC match “picture” puns with “Sorry picture for Photo-Me” and “Bleak picture for Photo-Me sales.”

My favorite, however technologically inaccurate, is from This is Money, who declare that “Photo-Me investors get the negatives.” Nice.

Craigslist’s “Missed Connections,” home to love-lorn singles and crazy stalkers and fodder for hours of fascinating reading, brings us the briefest gem of a story, with a tagline worthy of a short story: “Found: photobooth pics in Murakami library book”

Date: 2007-12-15, 10:54AM EST

Stuck between the pages of “The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle”, I found a strip of black and white photobooth photos: blond man and glasses girl, very much in love (or so it seems). If these are yours, I’d be happy to return them to you.

Good luck, little photostrip.

We’ve got more information to follow up on our previous note about Irene Stutz and her book Das Einfränklerimperium: Die Geschichte der Schnellphoto AG, or The One-Franc Empire: The History of Schnellphoto AG. Irene was kind enough to provide us with a description of the book in English as well as some images from the book itself.

The book tells the story of Schnellphoto AG, established and lead for many decades by Martin and Christoph Balkes. For one franc per image strip, the brothers provided the whole contry with square passport pictures — their machines became a national cultural treasure, their company a veritable empire of one franc coins. Since the end of 2006, the photo machines have been demolished and scrapped since the special photographic paper is no longer being produced. As analog machines are being replaced by digital ones, the original “snapshot character” is being lost through fun image settings and verbal instructions. But it was exactly the austerity and sobriety of the “photo machines” that triggered the desire for spontaneous self-representation.

The book will be published by Scheidegger & Spiess in Zürich, and it looks like it will be available through the publisher’s website as well as Amazon.de. Tonight, Irene will be having an opening for her new book in Zürich, which qualifies as the coolest photobooth-related event of the year, and we hope to see photos from the evening soon.

Images and text courtesy Irene Stutz

The New York Times City Room blog asks the question, will Stumptown Coffee Roasters be “planning an outpost in the lobby of the Ace Hotel, a Portland transplant that is scheduled to open on 29th Street and Broadway in 2009”? A fair question, to be sure, but more to the point, will the Ace be bringing another photobooth with them to New York, along with their painted brick interiors, camouflage bedside bibles, and their Rudy’s Barbershops? We shall see — and while we’re at it, when is the Seattle Ace going to get its own photobooth, as well? 

My high school German is pretty rusty, and I never could understand Schweizerdeutsch very well, but the images in a Schweizer Aktuell news report about Swiss photobooths say it all. An accompanying article about the “Fotokisten” being “endgültig Geschichte,” or “finally history,” has more to say about the situation. If any intrepid Photobooth.net readers would care to offer a translation, we’d appreciate it.

We’ve got more stills from the piece here.

Artist Irene Stutz’s fantastic site We Miss You pays tribute to these Swiss booths, and offers a preview of a book with photos and a historical account of the history of booths in Switzerland. We’ll post more on the project and on this story as we find out about it.