I stopped by Nini’s Corner yesterday to pick up a Sunday New York Times. I guess it’s been awhile since I bought one, but $4.50?! Isn’t there a discount for day-old news, like Bruegger’s has for bagels? Anyway, to follow up this weekend’s post about the article Why Hollywood Says Cheese, I present scans of the article. Click each image for a more readable copy. From the images in the continuation, it looks like there was something funky in the chemicals in the booth Pat O’Brien and Hilary Swank used, or she was wearing a veil in one of the shots.
Are we at critical mass yet? The Sunday New York Times for tomorrow (gotta love online access) will feature a big article on photobooths in Los Angeles, with words from Brett Ratner, Dave Navarro, and Gary Gulley — the usual suspects — as well as some news of previously unknown (to this author) booth locations. Read the story by Strawberry Saroyan (what a name; related to William? Ed. note: yes, grand-daughter) and see a few pictures; I’ll look for the print edition for some scans, as I bet there are more snaps in the paper itself. I spoke with Gary a few weeks ago and he gave me a preview of the Golden Globes appearance, though I forgot to do anything about it.
Opening tonight at Seattle’s Soil Art Gallery is a new exhibition called “knock-off.” Based on a 2003 trip to Italy, the installation by Nina Zingale and Gina Rymarcsuk uses photobooth photographs of figurines of religious and historic figures bought on the street. As the description reads
Zingale and Rymarcsuk borrowed the curbside Fotobooth’s ability to produce passport photos and then staged selected souvenirs into photo-ID poses (clustering them together in four repeated images).
This reference to “Fotobooth,” as though that’s a common name for something we all know, is somewhat misleading, and it seems clear from the small images available on the website that the images have been manipulated enough so as to be far from real photobooth photos anymore.
A classic photobooth that looks like it’s about to be overrun with flora and Christmas kitsch is being put up for auction on eBay.
The booth, currently located in Gillette, Wyoming, is described as having “rounded corners” and “all 3 curtains,” and, what’s more, it’s said to be (in classic eBayspeak) “a GREAT buy and A EVEN BETTER COLLECTORS ITEM!”
A dozen photos show the details of the booth, which is in indeterminate condition; it looks like it’s mostly all there, but who knows how close it is to actually working. Maybe Tim can lend his expert eye to the case.
Last week, a photobooth from neighboring Nebraska was sold on eBay as well.
Last night at the AMC Fenway Theater, we hit the photobooth trifecta. First, as we walked up the stairs to get tickets, we saw a giant banner for the film The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants (?), featuring a photobooth strip sticking out of someone’s massive back pocket. Second, after we bought our tickets and were on the way to the theater, a poster for A Lot Like Love that Aimee spotted, using four photobooth pictures as the poster image. And finally, ten minutes into Hitch a couple goes on a date and — what else? — spends some time in a photobooth, which we see from inside and out in a ten-second sequence. It’s getting big, people. Posters pictured here, and screencaps from Hitch will follow when it arrives on dvd.
Stuff (New Zealand) reports on the debut novel by television writer David Wolstencraft this week. The creator of the popular show “Spooks” (known as “MI‑5″ in the U.S.) has written a novel about — what else — espionage, titled Good News, Bad News. The story apparently centers on two agents, who are ordered, “apparently by bureaucratic error, to work together in the same photo booth in a London Underground station.” Now, I assume the writer means one of the hundreds of photobooths foundin Tube stations all over London, but what kind of work are two people going to do inside a photobooth? Guess I’ll have to read to novel.
Last week, another photobooth was sold at auction on eBay, this time for the sum of $1691.66. Before being sold, the photobooth was located P. O. Pears restaurant in Lincoln, Nebraska.
The description of the booth seems to make more of a deal about the item being from the “World Famous P. O. Pears” (which, according to their website, is a “Good Food & Good Time Saloon. A Lincoln landmark that has stood like a guardian over the intersection of 9th & M Streets since 1980. That’s two and a half decades of Burgers & Beer”), rather than the fact that it’s an old photobooth. It’s described as an “Auto-Photo Studio Model 14,” with serial #4320. I feel like photobooths are slowly making their way from five-and-dimes and restaurants in the Midwest to hip bars in Williamsburg and San Francisco. I wonder where this one will end up.
A New York Times article titled ‘Urban Studies: Where the Kids Are, and Were’ describes the arcade on Mott Street in Chinatown, and mentions the existence of the photobooth there. Having just returned from a trip to the City, the timing is a little frustrating — I’d always assumed the booth had disappeared — but I’ll add it to the list for the next time around.
TransformOnline’s Daily Blog chose the Photobooth Directory, whose days are numbered at Doubleperf.com now that Photobooth.net is getting its sea legs, as a pick of the day in their Culture section. Add that to the star turn on NYC cable in December and the slew of recent photobooth contributions I’ve received from New York, North Carolina, and Seattle in the last two months, and I’d call it the beginnings of something. We’re not at critical mass yet, but hey, people are paying attention, and more people will pay even more attention with a legit domain name, courtesy of Tim. Now, if I can just remember to keep using “photobooth” instead of “photo booth,” I think I’ll be all set.
If you find yourself in Edinburgh in the next few months, head over to the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art for the
Andy Warhol Self-Portraits exhibition, which opened this week. A review of the show in the Herald gives an overview of the pieces in the exhibit, which include Warhol’s famous photobooth self-portraits.
…[I]t is when he comes into contact with a real machine — the photobooth — that his self-portraits truly take off. The photobooth was Warhol’s studio as much as the Factory. In 1963 he made his first key series of silkscreens on canvas using photobooth pictures as a source. Warhol comes across like some composite portrait of an unholy triumvirate of criminal, celebrity and saint, dressed in overcoat, sunglasses, shirt and tie. Mugshot, publicity shot or studied portrait? The images are all three.
The exhibition closes May 2.
Another article on the exhibition, from Scotland on Sunday, mentions Warhol’s “early works and the original photo-booth snapshots on which they were based.”
