We have more than 20 photobooth locations listed in only three cities: New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles. Our to-do list of places we’ve heard about but haven’t had a chance to visit includes locations all around the country, but these three cities seem to be the national photobooth hubs. In the past week or so, I’ve visited two more local L.A. locations, one of which has had a photobooth awhile, Backstage in Culver City, and one of which is a long-standing store that recently added a booth: Pull My Daisy, in Silver Lake.

We’ve also come across news of a new photobooth at Quimby’s, a Chicago bookstore specializing in “the importation, distribution, and sale of unusual publications, aberrant periodicals, saucy comic booklets and assorted fancies as well as a comprehensive miscellany of the latest independent ‘zines’ that all the kids have been talking about.” The Quimblog has some great photos of the booth itself, its innards, and some nice sample photos from their new addition. Anyone visiting Chicago is encouraged to visit Quimby’s, take some samples, and buy some cool books and zines.

On another note, news of another step toward the death of the photobooth as a functional technology, at least in Europe, where dip and dunk photobooths are essentially dead already (more on that later): a new service allowing customers to upload digital photos which will then be checked for “biometric compatibility” and mailed back as a set of four passport-approved photos.

UPDATE 5/25/07: Thanks to Liz from Quimby’s, we’ve now got an entry for their new photobooth in our directory. And with a superstar of the literary world, Dishwasher Pete, in the sample photo. Nice!

Time for another update from the world of photobooth news, from the 1920s, the 1950s, and the 1960s.

• Time magazine’s website has put up the text of an April 4, 1927 article titled “Photomaton,” about inventor Anatol Josepho selling his invention to a “syndicate of men successful enough to know a real gold brick when they see one–including onetime Ambassador to Turkey Henry Morgenthau, President James G. Harbord of the Radio Corp. of America, John T. Underwood (typewriters), onetime Vice President Raymond B. Small of the Postum Cereal Co.” for $1 million. 

• A blog post by Christian Patterson informs us of an exhibit at the gallery of John McWhinnie @ Glenn Horowitz Bookseller titled c/o The Velvet Underground, which commemorates the 40th anniversary of the release of The Velvet Underground and Nico. Included in the exhibition, among various works by Andy Warhol and music and lyrics by the Velvet Underground, are “Original Warhol screen test film stills and photo booth pictures.” The exhibition is open until May 12 at the gallery, located at 50 1/2 East 64th Street in New York. We’d love to have a report on the photobooth pictures if anyone stops by.

• A fascinating story in the Lewiston (Maine) Sun Journal tells the story of a wallet, lost to a mugger in April of 1951 (along with the victim’s pants), that was recently found during the renovation of the Paramount Theater in Boston. The wallet, lost by Val Gregoire on April 11, 1956, was found on April 11, 2007 by Richard Bagen when he tore down a wall in the theater. The wallet was returned to his widow, Jeannette; Gregoire passed away in 2003. In the wallet, “There were several pictures of Val, an 18-year-old Navy sailor at the time. There were images of his mom, friends and a laminated photo of Jeannette, then his best girl. But there also were two pictures — seemingly taken from a photo booth — of Val and another girl. ‘Mine was laminated,’ Jeannette said of her photo, a pretty young girl in pearls. ‘Maybe that meant something’.”

Photo of the contents of the wallet, including four photobooth photos, by Amber Waterman, © 2007 Lewiston Sun Journal.

As we mentioned last month, hypnotist Derren Brown lured a student into a photobooth in the UK, at which point Brown and his team hypnotized the student, brought him (and the makeshift photobooth) to Marrakech, Morocco, and then woke him up.

A video of the segment, or at least eight minutes of it, is now available on YouTube. The photobooth, equipped with speakers and hidden cameras, is set up near Richard Crichtlow’s flat, and — here’s the convenient, made-for-tv part — he needs to get some passport photos, and steps in. Watch the video for the rest of the mildly entertaining but slightly underwhelming story.

The longer we look into the world of photobooths, the more people we find doing striking, fascinating, and surprising things with the the photos these machines produce. Today, we present two artists whose work take advantage of the ubiquity, affordability, and malleability of the photobooth photo, one older Russian and one young American.

The Russian artist, Andrey Chezhin, has work featured in a new exhibition called “Tools As Art: The Hechinger Collection,” opening April 27 at the San Francisco Museum of Craft and Design. A preview in the San Jose Mercury-news describes the show, and mentions Chezhin’s work:

Russian artist Andrey Chezhin used discarded photo booth head shots, replacing facial features with hardware, as a political statement about the loss of individual identity.

Read our artist page for Chezhin, a small Andrey Chezhin biography and C.V., and look at some of his other work.

We were also contacted this week by Daniel Minnick, much of whose work features photostrips and individual photobooth photos, sometimes simply by themselves and also heavily altered with added lines, colors, and shapes.

Minnick is a graduate of the San Francisco Art Institute, and has been featured in solo and group shows around California.

A look around Minnick’s online gallery is well worth the time; click on each individual photo or strip to see a series of related works featuring photobooth photos. They range from simple self-portraits to complex series, and exploit the versatility of the black and white photobooth in interesting ways.

The first time I did this was nearly a year ago, but the random Google search is back, and today’s word is “custody.” The most interesting hit on the first page of results is the story of Graham Young, the St. Albans Poisoner, a man who poisoned more than 70 people in his life, three of them fatally, beginning when he was just 15. Young was seen to be a generally creepy young man, unnverving those around him before and after he was finally caught by the police:

Young clearly enjoyed conveying such a chilling impression. When the press asked for a picture of the defendant, he insisted they use one in which he looked particularly cold-eyed and sinister. As it happened, the glowering photograph actually came about by accident. Holden explains that Young was scowling because he thought he had been cheated out of some money by the coin-operated photo booth where the picture was taken.

Young’s story was the basis for a film called The Young Poisoner’s Handbook, which, incidentally, I saw in October of 1995, with the director, Ben Ross, in person at the Cambridge Arts Cinema in England. Fascinating, I’m sure. I wonder if the photobooth photo made an appearance in the film…

Every time we discover a new photobooth, another one seems to disappear. Sometimes this happens to the same booth, and today we present listings for two photobooths in the Los Angeles area that came and went before we even had a chance to notice. Ricky visited photobooths at a salon called Lucas Echo Park and at a nearby Rite Aid pharmacy in December; by the time I visited in March, they were both gone. Another one of Ricky’s submissions, the photobooth at Café 50s in Sherman Oaks, has also gone away, replaced by a digital booth. 

While we’re happy to be an up-to-date guide for people looking for photobooths to visit as they travel the country, we also think it’s important to keep track of those dip and dunk photobooths that are no longer with us, or no longer where they once were. As we move into our third year of operation and get closer to a whopping 200 photobooths in our directory, look for some changes to the way we present our listings, making them easier to search and browse, and making it easier to tell which booths are still actually up and running. 

Thanks to the time and generosity of a photobooth enthusiast in Germany, our international photobooth listings have grown by five booths. As we near 200 photobooths in our list, we’re happy to have five fantastic-looking outdoor photobooths from Berlin in the database. Klaas first submitted the Rosenthalerplatz photobooth back in 2006, and this week, has passed on five more locations, all black and white booths that live outdoors and are accessible year-round, 24 hours a day. The photobooths are found on Zossenerstrasse, Warschauerstrasse, Marienburger Strasse, and at the S‑Bahn Rathaus Steglitz rail station (plus one more on the way).

Update: S‑Bahn Treptower Park has been added, bringing the total for Berlin to six booths.

Klaas’s photos are particularly evocative: check out the full version here and below the fold.

more…

From the world of British tv, we have a story about hypnotism, photobooths, and international air travel. Richard Critchlow, a 21 year-old student, was hypnotized in Wolverhampton London, England by Derren Brown. As this Sky News story explains, Critchlow woke up 13 hours later in an identical photobooth in Marrakech’s Djema al Fna market, more than 1400 miles away in Morocco.

Richard, 21, found himself in a chaotic Marrakech market after sleeping through a 13-hour trip. He stumbled out of a photo booth in the North African state after being hypnotised in an identical one in England. Brown told the Daily Mirror: “He was in a deep sleep. He had no sense of any time passing at all. His profound bewilderment eventually gave way to huge delight.” After being hypnotised, Mr Critchlow from Wolverhampton was whisked off to Heathrow Airport. The student was slumped in a wheelchair as he was put on a plane, flown to Morocco then wheeled through passport control.

I guess I should have stayed in Las Vegas another week: thanks to a comment on a previous post, we’ve seen flurry of black and white photobooth pictures of NBA All-Stars in Las Vegas for the game this past weekend.

The photobooth was at the Palms Casino, for an “All Star Media Availability” event on February 16, and the photos showcase the goofy grins of Shaquille O’Neal, Kobe Bryant, Steve Nash, LeBron James, and other familiar faces. Thanks to Amy for the original comment, which led us to Kevin Garnett, and then to a few Google Alerts that led us to the other photostrips around the web. You can check out seven photostrips here and four others here (with some duplicates).

The photos, as seen on Yahoo! Sports, are credited as “by Jennifer Pottheiser,” (see more of her NBA photos here) which brings up the age-old conundrum of how to credit a photobooth photo. The subject is usually the one who initiates the photographic action by inserting money or pressing a button, but when you get down to it, a machine is taking the photo, and we can credit the subject who pressed the button, the person overseeing the booth, or the whoever grabs the photo out of the slot and scans it.

Photo: Shaquille O’Neal, by Jennifer Pottheiser/NBAE via Getty Images on Yahoo! Sport.

A few photobooth-related projects and other additions to the site: first, we’ve mentioned the Photoboof project before, but we’d like to point out Alex’s photos of the inside of a great old Canadian black and white booth, one of four that was being re-covered for a corporate event. The photos document the inside, the outside, and the mechanical innards of the booth, and are worth a look inf you’ve never seen the chemical baths and spider mechanism.

Secondly, a recent exhibition at the Stockholm Moderna Museet featured the photographs of Carl Johan De Geer, a photographer, artist, and musician who made his own homemade photobooth in the 1960s that allowed viewers to photograph themselves. The resulting photos, more than 300 of which are now in the museum’s collection, depict the artist’s family and friends, as well as artists and musicians, both known and unknown.

And finally, the most interesting photobooth project of late, the John Wilkes Photo Booth. The name says it all; check it out for yourself.

Photo: John Wilkes Photo Booth schematic, boothshotme.com.