As part of the 2009 International Photobooth Convention to be held in Chicago in April, we’ll be putting on a group show of art created in and inspired by the photobooth as well as collections of vernacular or found photobooth photos. 

We’ve posted a Call for Entries (PDF) which we encourage you to download and check out if you’re interested in submitting a piece or collection for the show. 

The text of the Call for Entries follows:

2009 International Photobooth Convention Group Show

CALL FOR ENTRIES

The 2009 International Photobooth Convention is now accepting entries for a group show at Center Portion in Chicago, Illinois, to be held April 3–4, 2009. The exhibition seeks to showcase artwork created in and inspired by the photobooth, as well as collections of vernacular or found photobooth photos. The show is open for entry to all artists working in any media, so long as they utilize or reference the photobooth. All entries will be included in an accompanying digital gallery on Photobooth.net, while selected artists will be asked to show their work at Center Portion for the duration of the Convention.

For review by the show’s curators, please submit digital files of your entry. Files should be in jpeg format at 300 dpi. Please provide a short bio, artist statement, and any other pertinent information (in PDF or .doc format). Digital files may be uploaded using the following address:

https://www.photobooth.net/convention/submit

Digital submission entry deadline: March 15th, 2009. Selected artists for the International Photobooth Convention Group Show will be contacted by March 20th with shipping instructions.

Please direct all questions to convention@photobooth.net

We look forward to your contributions to the event.

Photobooth.net and 312photobooth.com are very pleased to announce the 2009 International Photobooth Convention, a two-day event featuring photobooth art, workshops, lectures, projects, and of course, free photochemical photobooths. The event will be held at the Center Portion artist project space in Chicago’s Logan Square, Friday and Saturday April 3rd and 4th, 2009.

We were last involved in the International Photobooth Convention back in 2005 in St Louis, held just a few weeks after we launched Photobooth.net. In the four years since then, we’ve learned a lot and made a lot of connections around the world, which ought to make this year’s event even bigger and better than the last.

The convention is being organized by the same group that put the 2005 event together, Tim and Brian from Photobooth.net and Mr. Mixup, joined this time by Anthony Vizzari of 312photobooth.com, who is graciously sponsoring the event and organizing the event on the ground in Chicago.

We will be sketching out the schedule for the event over the next few weeks, so stay tuned to the convention page for more details as they’re finalized.

We hope some of our readers will be able to join us in Chicago, and for those who can’t, we’ll be updating the blog throughout the event, as well as following what’s going on through our Twitter account, so be sure to follow along if you’re interested.

For those interested in submitting work for our photobooth gallery show, we’ll be announcing our call for entries in the next few days. Please send any questions about the show, or the convention in general, to the convention organizers, and we hope to see many of you in Chicago in April!

Happy to find a photobooth-related event in Southern California, I ventured to the Santa Monica Airport this afternoon, armed with a stack of Photobooth.net postcards, to attend the second annual Vernacular Photography Fair, which we noted here a few days ago. The event, held in a gallery space at the Santa Monica Art Studios, consisted of ten dealers from around the country who specialize in “found photography, anonymous imagery or snapshot photography,” as well as hundreds of photography enthusiasts browsing, buying, and talking photos.

I was happy to make the acquaintance of Babbette Hines, whose book Photobooth was one of the inspirations that helped launch this site more than four years ago. We had a nice conversation about the joys of photobooth photos, and commiserated about the recent upswing in prices that have made collecting them less affordable than it used to be.

I also enjoyed meeting a number of other folks, including dealers Myles Haselhorst of Ampersand Vintage in Portland, Leonard Lightfoot of Vernacular Visions, John Nichols of the Santa Paula Snapshot Museum, as well as the folks who put together the event. I’m hoping Photobooth.net can be more involved next time; I could see a lot of interesting ways to collaborate. Two years after moving here, it’s great to finally get a little more involved in the vintage photography scene. Thanks to everyone at D3 Projects for putting this together.

This weekend in Santa Monica, California, D3Projects, in conjunction with a variety of dealers, artists, and other groups, is presenting their second annual Vernacular Photography Fair, an event which should be of interest to all photobooth fans in Southern California.

In the press release on their website, D3 describe the event as “Two days of vernacular photography, featuring top dealers nationwide — photos & books for sale.”

Vernacular photography — also known as found photography, anonymous imagery or snapshot photography — is a genre of photography making its way into the spotlight of fine art. Artists, collectors and dealers rediscover photographs estranged from their owners and lost in time at flea markets, estate and yard sales, attics and even in abandoned boxes on the street. The new owners of these photographs give them a new life and relevance in the world today.

Found photographs, anonymous images and snapshots from the 20s until the late 70s will be offered for show and for sale to the public by the following art dealers: Jane Handel, Leonard Lightfoot, Ray Hetrick, Babbette Hines, Diane Meyer, Carl Mautz, John Nichols, Desiree Dreeuws, Ron Slattery and Myles Haselhorst.

We’ll be attending and look forward to meeting other photobooth and found photo enthusiasts. We’ll have a report on the event next week.

In July, we noted an upcoming show of photobooth photos in Hamburg, Germany, called Wait Until Dry, with photos from the collection of Photobooth.net contributor Klaas Dierks as well as two other artists. Klaas has sent in photos from the show as well as an account of the event:

We decided to present 22 frames with series of booth pix that were on one hand arranged rather freely on the grounds of similarity and/or difference, and on the other hand overviews over people during different times, say the 30s, 40s, 60s, 70s.

We also had a series depicting the same person over a period from 1929–1944 in 14 photos. All in all we showed approximately 220 photobooth pix out of a collected 4000.

From left to right: Irina Ruppert, Klaas Dierks, Sven Heckmann selecting the photos for the exhibition

Opening night at the “Raum für photographie.”

View of the exhibition venue

Exhibition-room

Thanks to Klaas for the photos, and we encourage anyone else involved in a photobooth show or anyone who attends one to send us photos and tell us all about it.

We’re ending Book Week with an oldie but a goodie, the catalog for the ground-breaking group show called “Photomaton: A Contemporary Survey of Photobooth Art,” which took place at the Pyramid Arts Center in Rochester, New York more than twenty years ago, in the winter of 1987–88. The catalog has been somewhat hard to come by, and copies show up on eBay on average maybe once a year in the four years we’ve been paying attention, usually running around $100 a copy. I managed to pick up a copy for about twenty bucks in August, just in time to bring everyone a closer look at it.

Having not seen one of these catalogs before, the first thing that struck me about it was its size; it’s not a full-size 8.5″ x 11″ publication; it’s more like 7″ x 8.5″, no taller than it needs to be to fit one scale photostrip vertically on the page. Featuring work on the front cover by Herman Costa and on the back cover by Jef Aerosol, the catalog samples the work of thirteen photobooth artists, with images and biographies of each artist.

Curator and artist Bern Boyle wrote a preface to the catalog in which he explains the exhibition.

This exhibit was designed as an overview, and does not include all photobooth artists, or all of the photobooth works of the exhibiting artists. But it is quite a beginning, and in addition to calling attention to the artists whose works are shown here, it should encourage other exhibits and stimulate historical research.

Indeed, it was quite a beginning, and the intervening years have seen many photobooth-related exhibitions and, as we’ve seen this week, much historical research.

The catalog continues with a brief essay titled “Photobooth History and Development,” also by Boyle, which begins with the history of coin-operated vending machines and passes through Mathew Steffens, “Monsieur Enjalbert,” and Anatol Josepho, all familiar names in the development of the technology. Boyle mentions Warhol’s role in using the photobooth in the creation of art, and continues by discussing the techniques and interests of each of the artists in the show.



The show came at a time when photobooths seemed to be on the wane, but before the digital revolution that would be their most serious threat. Boyle writes

There are still streamlined, curved photobooths around producing strips of four black and white pictures, but many machines are being converted to color or abandoned for the square-format color machines. We now have machines that will videotape you and your friends and machines that will give you a roll of 35mm film ready to process, instead of the traditional photos!

Each artist is given a page that includes a sample self-portrait photostrip, their birth date and place of residence, as well as an artist’s statement. Sample work from selected artists is featured next, followed by a selected bibliography.

We hope you’ve enjoyed Book Week; here’s a link to all of the entries in case you missed any. I started it a little haphazardly and had only planned to write about two or three books, but when I looked around, I realized there were more works out there that I hadn’t given proper attention to, enough to flesh out a full seven days’ worth of posts. Please let us know what you think of the books if you pick up copies for yourselves, and we’d appreciate any tips on more works not in our Photobooths In Print section.

We’re expanding the scope of Book Week to include not only new and recent works, but works that are new to us; in this case, two recently acquired exhibition catalogs of work by the best-known photobooth artist working today, Liz Rideal.



The catalog for Rideal’s “Photobooth Collages” show at the Photographers’ Gallery in London in 1990 is a small, square volume that features images of Rideal’s work along with an essay about her work, her process, and her interests by David Chandler.



For the most part, the works contained in Collages are representative, with subjects ranging from a strawberry (“Spring,” in a four seasons project) to a woman holding her finger to her mouth in “Shhhh…” One of the most interesting items in the show is a nearly ten foot-long adaptation of five bars of Purcell’s “The Fairy Queen” from his 1692 autograph score. Not only are the staffs, bars, and notes recreated with abstract black shapes on a white background, but every once in awhile, Rideal’s hand is visible at the top of an eighth note or the bottom of a bar line, reminding the viewer of the scale of the piece and of its origin in the photobooth.



Eleven years later, in March of 2001, Rideal opened a show called “Stills” at Lucas Schoormans Gallery in New York City, and the catalog for that show provides a look at a very different stage in Rideal’s career.



Most of the pieces presented in the catalog are large (3′ x 4′) grids of color photostrips depicting flowers, plants, and other items on color backgrounds. Some pieces are enlargements of just a few frames from a pair of photostrips, but all of them share a sense of repetition and abstraction.



The catalog includes two essays, by Norman Bryson and Charles Darwent, that explore Rideal’s inspirations, her technique, and her significance.

“What happens, then, when the products of the photo-booth are tranposed to the domain of art?” asks Bryson. “For that is Liz Rideal’s opening move, one whose extraordinary consequence her work continues to trace. It is as though the split between official propriety and secret dissidence were now elaborated and amplified, made deeper and more complex, on the gallery walls.”

More than two years ago, we mentioned a recent book by the photobooth artist Jan Wenzel titled Fotofix. I didn’t yet have a copy of the book, but promised a review as soon as I got ahold of one. Well, the book came quickly, but the review, obviously, did not.

Better late than never, I say, and don’t let our tardiness in getting to the book encourage you to do the same; Fotofix is a phenomenal collection of some of the most awe-inspiring photobooth art you’ll ever see. Wenzel takes the familiar confines of the photobooth and slowly explodes them with a series of images made up of four or five (or more) photostrips laid next to one another. From the first image, a dresser floating on a green background in five photostrips, through to an entire room rendered in eight parallel photostrips, the reader is left in awe of Wenzel’s absolute control over the space a photobooth affords, and his creativity and ingenuity in conceiving and executing his constructions.



In an excellent essay that opens the book, titled “From the Garbage into the Booth — Or: Instant Pictures of Topsyturvy Everyday Life,” Wenzel tells of how photobooths first came to East Germany after the fall of the wall and the reunification of Germany. The machines got an unprecedented amount of use because “just about everyone needed new photos for passports and I.D. cards, while those who had already been made redundant by the first summer after German Reunification needed pictures for their job-application forms.”

The book is really a must for any photobooth enthusiast; it’s difficult to express the sense of incredulity you get looking through some of the images Wenzel has created, and the work is a testament to the versatility and power of the photobooth. The book is widely available through online booksellers, and is well worth checking out.

As Book Week continues, we bring you another invaluable work from Italy, Professor Federica Muzzarelli’s 2003 work, Formato tessera: Storia, arte e idee in photomatic. Muzzarelli, who is a professor of the History of Photography at the University of Bologna, has written a book that covers the story of photobooths from all angles: the history of portrait photography, the role of the photobooth in the creation of art, the photobooth’s place in popular culture, and the digital future of photobooths, among many other topics.



Without fluent Italian skills, our understanding of the book is naturally less than complete, but a rough translation of the chapter headings, a perusal of the plentiful and wide-ranging sources cited in footnotes, and a glance at the excellent illustrations — from early carte de visites to Marcello Mastroianni, from Duchamp to Benetton ads — make it clear that Muzzarelli’s work is the most rigorous academic survey of the history and significance of the photobooth that we have yet seen.



We hope the book will eventually receive an English translation; until then, it is available for purchase through a variety of online retailers. Thanks to Professor Muzzarelli for her work on this excellent resource, and for getting in touch with us here to share Formato tessera with us.

Covering the world of photobooths as we do from our home base in the United States, it’s often difficult for us to gauge the impact and explore the history of photobooths in other countries. We know about the present-day fotoautomaten around Germany, and about the demise of photochemical booths in Switzerland, and the interesting booths we’ve learned about in places like Helsinki and Kiev, but we don’t have a tangible sense of the depth of influence that the photobooth has had in many places outside our own sphere.

Over the years, though, thanks to enthusiasts and scholars around the world, we’ve been able to learn more about the role of the photobooth internationally. The importance of the photobooth in Italian arts and history in particular has become increasingly clear, and though it seems nearly all photochemical booths have been wiped off the Italian map, we have ample evidence of their historical significance.

Today, we present the first of two Italian photobooth books we’ve learned of recently: Photomatic e altre storie, a collection of works by the photographer Franco Vaccari, with accompanying essays by art historians and critics. I’d first like to thank Marco for letting us know about this book and for sending us a copy as part of an international photobooth book exchange — who knows how long it would have taken us to come across it without Marco’s help.

Franco Vaccari, a photographer who has been exhibiting work in Italy and around the world for more than 40 years, is best known for his “Exhibitions in Real Time,” primarily the piece he exhibited at the Venice Biennale in 1972, “Leave a photographic trace of your passage on these walls.” Visitors to the exhibition found a photobooth in the middle of a room, and were encouraged to take a photostrip and hang it on the wall.

Vaccari also collected submissions of photostrips from ordinary Italians, taken in 700 photobooths all over the country, some of which are collected in the book.



One of the most appealing elements of the book for us is the series of portraits of the photobooths themselves, looking timeless but also very much of their era, in train stations, city centers, and along the side of the road.



If you’re interested in the international history of photobooths, and in the investigations into individuality and identity that Vaccari undertakes, we highly recommend picking up this book, which seems to be available from a number of European booksellers, as well as the publisher.