We spent the past weekend in Las Vegas, and I hoped to find a couple of photobooths, ready for enthusiastic partygoers to document their weekends of debauchery. I should have known that in a place so heavily trafficked and constantly upgraded as Las Vegas, most of the booths would be digital. At the arcade at New York New York, the photobooth was digital, as it was at the arcade at MGM, and from examples I’ve seen on the web, the photobooths at Stratosphere and the Rainforest Cafe are both digital, as well. A photobooth in front of the Imperial Palace casino closed last year, and was probably digital anyway. So, I was pleased to find a Flickr photo of a photostrip from a real dip and dunk chemical photobooth in Las Vegas.

On Saturday afternoon, I paid a visit to this photobooth, at the Golden Palm Hotel. From the MGM Grand, where we were staying, I took off along Tropicana Boulevard toward the Golden Palm, about a mile away. I expected a brief stroll, but it was more like a hike, over two giant pedestrian bridges, through the parking lot of the Excalibur, over Interstate 15, and around the chainlink fence and into the Golden Palm’s parking lot. Crossing I‑15 from the Strip is like entering another world, and the hotel was pretty dead. It used to be the Golden Palm Casino and Hotel, but it seems to be the Golden Palm Hotel and Lounge now, with the “Casino” unceremoniously painted over on their sign. The photobooth was indeed a real Photo-Me booth, but it was in the lounge, and the lounge didn’t open for another four hours. So, I was stuck snapping a photo through a locked exterior door, and I hope an intrepid Las Vegas photobooth enthusiast will send us a scan of a photo from this booth at some point in the future. I also hope I’m not right, and that there are a few more old-style photobooths still around in Las Vegas.

Corel Software, the fine folks who brought you Word Perfect (or at least bought it and revived it) are currently promoting what they call the Corel Snapfire Plus Photo Booth Contest, in which they will be “compiling the world’s biggest photo booth photo strip” through user-submitted snapshots. I hate to be so critical when they’re obviously trying to rustle up interest in their product by tapping into whatever warm feelings people have for the photobooth, but they do such a poor job that we have to point some things out. First, of course, it’s a photobooth-style strip, but it’s sort of strange to say they’re compiling the world’s largest photostrip, when it’s really just an assemblage of digital photos that people send in. Are they really even going to print them in a long strip?

In their statement, they say, “Yes, we want those one-armed self portraits that everyone has taken of themselves at some point. ” So it’s not even really supposed to be in the style of a photobooth shot, but rather in the just-as-recognizable but much newer digital camera self-portrait style, slightly off-kilter but charming.

We want you to send us your photo, and we’ll add it to (what we hope will be) the world’s longest photo booth photo strip!

Are there other photostrips out there that are longer than the traditional strip, like, say, nine or ten inches long? Are they worried they might not make it?

Contest details: Submit your photo showing love, ready to be added to a long line of photographs (just like a good old fashioned photos booth) [sic]. It’s easy!

And the final instruction of the contest:

Visit snapfire.com on February 14th to see yourself as part of the World’s Biggest Photo Booth!

Wait a minute. Are we trying to make the world’s longest strip or the world’s biggest photobooth? Those are two really different things.

And finally,

That’s all there is to it! Keep an eye on Snapfire.com on Valentine’s Day to see you’re [sic] picture as part of the world’s biggest photo booth.

Hmm. We’ll keep our eyes peeled to see what the final photostrip — or photobooth — looks like.

A press release from Skidmore College announces an upcoming photography exhibition from Joachim Schmid, whose “Photoworks” show includes all variety of photographs, including forgotten photobooth photos. The show will be presented at the Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery, and will run through April 9, 2007. 

As an artist who works in the medium of found photography, Joachim Schmid salvages photos from flea markets and archives, cuts them out of catalogues and publications, retrieves them from city streets, and finds them on the Internet. He then assembles series of photos as artworks that explore the emotional power and recurrent eccentricities of everyday photography. 

The 111 images randomly excerpted for the Tang exhibition include family snapshots, ID photos, and photo-booth discards that Schmid picked up over the past 25 years on walks through cities around the world. Many images are creased, tire-tracked, torn up, walked on, rain-soaked, and/or sun-faded. 

Photo-Me, the international company responsible for photochemical and digital photobooths around the world, has hired Lazard as financial advisors to help them deal with a potential break-up of the company into three separate sectors.

The appointment of Lazard, which will work alongside JPMorgan Cazenove, the group’s existing financial adviser and joint broker, marks the start of a strategic review that could lead to a sale of one or all of the three businesses, Photo-Me said.

As we noted last month, Photo-Me has been considering splitting up its three sectors — vending, minilab manufacturing and wholesale manufacturing — and selling off one or more of them. In light of changes in the photography industry as well as the approach of biometric passports, Photo-Me has seen rough financial times over the last year or so.

Phoeniz Arizona’s Trunk Space, home to a photobooth we’ve long had on our “To Visit” list, is having, as we speak, a sort of going away party for their photobooth technician, Mike.

More about Mike: He has worked at this job for 21 years! In the past 2 months he has lost all his profitable photobooths (the ones at Spectrum got robbed twice) and the other mall went digital. He has kept our photobooth from getting removed (due to poor sales) more than once. 

The gallery, whose booth was voted best photobooth in Phoenix, is home to “Experimental Theater, Performance, Music, Puppets, Weird Stuff, Circus Side Show Acts, Fine Art, Handmade Gifts, & Espresso drinks, as well as being a meeting place for artists, curious people and weary travelers.”

We’ve seen a lot of photos from the booth on Flickr and LiveJournal, but we’d really love an official contribution to our Locator in the form of a photo of the booth itself and a nice high-quality scan of a photostrip. It would double our count of Arizona photobooths, and we’d love to have the ‘Space represented. 

A not-to-be-missed photobooth buying opportunity is happening right now, as a Los Angeles-based photographer is having a moving sale that includes a 1945 Auto Photo booth. The booth, which looks like a classic rounded-end Model 9 and seems to be in absolutely mint condition, comes with a stock of paper, chemicals, parts, and a copy of the original manual. If you’ve got $16,500 to part with or make the best offer received, the booth is yours.

A piece of downtown Los Angeles history, manufactured at the original Auto-Photo factory on Santa Fe. Sit down, drop a quarter in the slot, and the fun begins. The original air compressor fires up, the lights turn on and off four times, an amazing mechanical contraption processes your portraits, and two minutes later, out slides a vintage looking b&w photo strip. Ready to use.

If only we had enough time to start a fundraising campaign for the purchase of an official Photobooth.net Photobooth — this would be the one. We’ll try to keep tabs on where this beauty goes.

Save Tillie, a “volunteer organization comprised of 1,000 friends of Asbury Park,” New Jersey, is an organization dedicated to saving the Palace amusement park and its iconic Tillie image. After the demolition of the building in 2004, the group “saved more than 125 internal artifacts from the Palace and the Tillie mural from the Cookman Avenue wall…; In the last few weeks, another prized element from the Palace’s past is on its way home: the photobooth.

In a great story on the Save Tillie site, the group tells the story of the photobooth, which had been at Palace for 30 years, making a move to Folkheart, a store in Vermont, in 1988. Now, nearly twenty years later, as the photobooth sat in disrepair and Folkheart’s owners prepared to close up shop, they donated the booth to Save Tillie. Folkheart was long on Photobooth.net’s radar as home to the only booth in Vermont, so we’re saddened to hear that it’s no more. Any other leads, readers? Now, back to the story:

On December 28, 2006 Save Tillie members Dan Toskaner, Frank Saragnese, and Mary Lynn Purcell drove to Vermont with a large trailer to rescue this valuable Palace artifact. Despite some dust, grime, and a large spider web inside the camera window, they found the machine to be in remarkably good condition. The exterior oak and white/gold speckled Formica is completely intact. The illuminated script “Photographs” sign still sits on top. In recognition of its history, someone stamped a small Tillie face next to a handwritten $2.00 sign. Best of all, beneath a sheet of plexiglass on the outer graphic panel there is a homemade collage of very old photo strips. The owners of Folkheart confirmed that these strips were already there when they bought the booth, which means that they were taken at the Palace. Save Tillie is hoping that some of the people in these photos can be identified.

The photobooth is currently undergoing restoration, and will be ready for action again soon; Save Tillie hope to return it to use in Asbury Park, where it began its life. Besides being a great story about nice people who care about history, the story is a testament to the power of the photobooth and the pull it has on generations of New Jersey amusement park-goers and Vermont store-browsers and all of us. We wish the best of luck to the folks at Save Tillie, and hope they keep us updated with the progress and the future of their beloved booth.

Photo of Save Tillie volunteers and the booth outside Folkheart from savetillie.com.

2007 should be a banner year for Photobooth.net, our second full year of existence, bringing new changes and additions to the site, as well as more coverage of the continuing saga of the world’s favorite somewhat instant, usually affordable, always unique moment-capturing contraption. We hope to bring news of another Photobooth Convention for 2007, as well as other interesting an exciting developments. For now, we’ll rattle off a few new additions that have come around in the last few weeks:

• A recent project called The Photo-Silhouette Booth.

• Films from the last twenty years with photobooth apperances including Mi Vida Loca, Lackawanna Blues, The Forgotten, Just Between Friends, and L’Auberge espagnole.

• In the realm of television, recent additions include an episode of “The Simpsons,” an appearance in “Ugly Betty,” and two episodes of “One Tree Hill.” Forthcoming, a scene from this week’s episode of “My Name Is Earl.”

Let us know what you’d like to see in 2007, and keep your submissions, tips, and suggestions coming. 

Photo-Me, the world’s largest manufacturer and vendor of photobooths, has announced its most recent profit report, which saw a drop of 30% over profits of a year ago, according to a BBC News report. After turning down the idea of a takeover earlier this year, the company is now apparently looking into selling off one of three divisions.

“The vending side is more obviously of interest to more people, so that is more likely to have a bigger attraction initially,” Vernon Sankey, Photo-Me’s chairman told news agency Reuters.

“We have no doubt we will find people interested, but the question is at what price.”

The three parts of the firm — vending, minilab manufacturing and wholesale manufacturing — are all being assessed to see what the company will decide to do with them.

Read more news about Photo-Me in our archives.

A few months after moving here to L.A., I’m still tracking down photobooths I’ve heard about in bars and restaurants around the city. Friday night, we ventured downtown to Bar 107, described in a Gridskipper review as “a very respectable hole in the wall on 4th, [bursting] with ironic hipster chic one might think lacking on the left coast- red walls, ginormous NSFW Bible art, stuffed deer heads, random signs, etc.”

The black and white photobooth in the back room is nestled behind a few curved booths with just enough space in between to allow for entrance to the booth. The height of the booth (the one to sit on) comes up to the height of the drying slot and makes it almost difficult to get the photostrip out once it’s finished. The booth makes some nice photos, and the bar has got a good feel to it.

Try to get a glass of tap water maybe, though, rather than being stuck with their $4 a bottle “Liquid Salvation Ultra-Hydrating Water” like we were.