Residents in Workington in northern England would rather see a post box in their local post office than a photo booth, according to an article in the Workington Times & Star. We can’t blame them, actually; it seems pretty strange that a customer in the town post office would have to queue up and hand a stamped letter to a postal clerk, rather than be able to drop the letter in a post box.
Is that an excuse for photobooth-bashing, though? As one unhappy resident is quoted about the current setup at the post office, “Instead we’ve got a silly photo booth, which they’ve already got in Woolworths. They could’ve put a post box somewhere.”
The National Trust for Historic Preservation reports on the opening of a restored Woolworth building in Oxnard, California. The building opened as a Woolworth store in 1950 and closed in the late 1990s, when Woolworth closed their 400 remaining U.S. locations. (The article states that the closing was in 1998, though Wikipedia and other sources state July 17, 1997 as the date).
The first floor of the newly restored building houses a museum of Woolworth history, including “vending machines, an antique take-your-own-photo booth and payphone.” Woolworth photobooths introduced the affordable, instant photograph to a great number of people over the years, and the mass closing brought an end to the only photobooth in town for many communities. Nice to see one back in the plus column.
This sunny spring morning brings with it the full, official, public debut of Photobooth.net. Since this site has at its core an interest in collecting and documenting the history of the hard-to-find photobooth and its often ephemeral by-products, it seems like a good idea to take stock of the history of the site itself, before we lose sight of where we came from in the flurry of contributions and accolades. Let us know when that’s supposed to start, will you?
I started my photobooth project in the fall of 2003. By the spring of 2005, when I folded it into this collaboration, I had 31 films, 8 television shows, 4 commercials, and one music video featuring photobooths listed.
In my Photo Booth Directory, I had 50 photobooth locations listed, seven of which were submitted by five different contributors. The booths were located in 14 states and one foreign country. I had personally visited the other 43, in ten states and one foreign country.
On May 1, 2005, Photobooth.net was the 26th result in a Google search for the term “photobooth”; the result was for the 7th International Photobooth Convention page. Interestingly enough, the ninth result in that same search was for my Doubleperf.com Photo Booth Directory page, and the tenth result was for Tim’s photoboothstl.com, so we were both already well-represented.
I also spelled “photobooth” as “photo booth.” Tim and I, ever the trendsetters with hopes of creating our own brave new linguistic world, have agreed to spell it as one compound word. This is important stuff, really.
A lengthy photobooth session led to a major altercation at a Massachusetts Chuck E. Cheese’s this past Sunday, the Fitchburg Sentinel & Enterprise reports. Three girls, all cousins, aged 21, 18, and 14, were arrested and charged with “assault and battery with a dangerous weapon (shod foot).”
Apparently, the girls sat in the photobooth taking photos for at least half an hour while a family waited outside to use the booth. When the girls finally relented and let Eduarda Silveira, her husband, and their six-month daughter in to use the booth, the girls continued to insult and abuse the family. The abuse escalated into a fight in which “one teen allegedly began pulling Silveira’s hair, punching her, and eventually knocked her to the ground and kicked her.”
We love photobooths, but come on, people, they’re not worth fighting over. Especially when the fighting involves punching, hair-pulling, and assault with a shod foot.
This is not the first time a photobooth has been in the middle of an incident involving assault and Massachusetts law enforcement officers, though. A few years ago (and if anybody knows when, I’d appreciate the info), photobooth artist Paul Yates was assaulted and detained by rent-a-cop security personnel at the BostonBowl photobooth as he was taking photos, some of which happened to involve no clothing. The Boston Phoenix’s story on the incident is worth a read.
UPDATE, Thursday, April 28, 2005: According to a report in today’s Fitchburg Sentinel & Enterprise, the photobooth was a digital “Photo Sketch” model.
French eBay is a treasure trove of photobooth paraphernalia, we’ve recently discovered. After nabbing a photobooth pin and Photomaton promotional brochure a few weeks ago, I came across this interesting item today: an adjustable photobooth seat, or “Tabouret de photomaton,” as they say in Paris.
The stool gives the choices of “Plus bas” and “Plus haut,” with instructions to “Réglez le siege” also printed on the seat. The seller describes the item as “super déco”; I would have to agree. I don’t know if it’s worth 100 euro, where the bidding starts, but it would certainly make a great conversation piece, or a nice replacement seat for an ailing booth.
It’s been a few weeks since a photobooth has been listed for sale on eBay, but today brings us a color booth sold by American Amusement Co. of Rossville, Georgia. The five day auction begins with an opening bid of one dollar and features no reserve price, so watchful enthusiasts out there could walk away with this one at a bargain price.
The seller doesn’t make any detailed descriptions of the condition of the machine, stating only that the machine “should work fine, just needs supplies.”
I know there must be a taxonomy of photobooth machines out there, but I’m not familiar with it at this point. I’d love to be able to describe this machine, and any others we come across, with some sort of name, series, number, year, or other category that would help us keep track of the fascinating differences among the machines.
I came across a couple of nice photos of foto/photoautomaten on Antenna’s Fotolog recently. One of them even features “ein Wartebänkchen,” or “little waiting bench” — gotta love German compound nouns. From my rudimentary research, I place them in Berlin, though I’m not certain. Their unique designs are really terrific — I’d love to visit them sometime.
As a way of catching up with blog-worthy material from the recent past, I’ll be posting some notes about articles and mentions that are worth noting but aren’t the newest of the new. The most useful and well-written article from a major paper in the past year is Rob Elder’s May 25, 2004 piece from the Chicago Tribune, “The strange allure of photo booths,” still available online. Elder provides an in-depth look at the history of photobooths, looks into the relationship between traditional booths and digital machines, and goes on a pub crawl with Photo-Me’s Gary Gulley. Also included are words from Nakki Goranin and the felicitously named James Photopoulos of Photo’s Hot Dogs, longtime home to a photobooth in Mt. Prospect, Illinois.
A true photobooth devotee, Elder combines his personal experiences and thoughts about photobooths with historical background and interviews. He captures the attraction many people have with booths in one of his opening paragraphs: “For me, finding a photo booth is like discovering a chocolate egg long after Easter has ended. They’re often stashed away in the forgotten corners of America, in the dusty backroom of bars or lost in aging arcades.”
In addition to the excellent article, Elder includes three photo galleries and a lengthy list of Chicago-area photobooths, which I put to use in my October, 2004 visit to the city.
Synthesizing articles from the Chicago Tribune and the New York Times into a brief catch-up, Richmond Times-Dispatch columnist Gary Robertson discusses photobooths in his American Trends column today. Nothing new to report, but when we start seeing news reports about news reports, something must be newsworthy.
Tonight, Ken and Deirdre, characters on the long-running UK soap Coronation Street will marry, and a photobooth has a role to play in the episode. Their wedding was set to coincide with the Royal Wedding of Prince Charles and Camilla Parker Bowles, but the funeral of Pope John Paul forced the royals to postpone their wedding by a day, and Coronation Street producers made some last-minute editing changes to go along with the re-scheduled nuptials.
