In the first installment of a week-long look at new and recent photobooth books, we’ve got a copy of Dan Zelinsky and the Musée Mécanique’s wonderful new creation, Lost & Found at the Musée Mécanique. Styled like a pin-bound fan-style book of paint samples, the book is an actual-size reproduction of more than 150 photostrips left behind and collected at the San Francisco institution over the last 35 years.

The Musée, home to mechanical musical instruments, arcade games, fortune-telling machines, and two great black and white booths (1 and 2) began as the collection of Edward Zelinsky, and is now under the care of his son Dan Zelinsky, who assembled this book.

During a trip to the Musée in February, we learned about Dan’s plans for the book, and we’re very happy to see it has become a reality.

You can buy the book in person if you’re in San Francisco (and if you’re passing through, a trip to Pier 45 is a must), or you can order the book on the Musée’s website. Let them know you heard about it here; we don’t get anything out of it, we’re just curious.

It’s time for more updates and a few random tidbits from around the photobooth world: first of all, did anyone out there know that Kenneth Cole made a style of boot named Photo Booth?

Now that that game-changing piece of news is out of the way, on to more relevant things: first, Ted Travelstead’s “Suggested Poses for Photo-Booth Pictures” from McSweeney’s is pretty great. 

They start out small: “(a) Big ol’ cheesy smile, (b) “I am not a crook” face with double peace sign, © Doin’ the funky chicken,” and quickly progress to the very involved: “(a) Peacocking for the paparazzi on the red carpet at the premiere of your cinematic masterpiece, (b) Smoking a cigarette nonchalantly by the pool while half-listening to an eager interviewer, © Sweating profusely, cheap black hair dye running from your graying temples, as you desperately plead for a walk-on role in a C‑movie about a ghost clown so you can afford one more week in a seedy North Hollywood motel.” I’m not quite sure why he chose to list only three at a time, when photobooths come most commonly in strips of four, but that’s beside the point.



We gave up waiting for The Wonder Years to come out on DVD and managed to find another option for getting images from the episode titled “Summer Song,” in which Kevin and his family go to Ocean City and he meets Teri, an older girl who takes a liking to him. They take some photos in a booth, and Kevin cherishes them forever, of course. 

We’ve also added a page for a Danish film titled Mig og mafiaen (“Me and the Mafia”), which turns out to be a remake of Ooh… You Are Awful, right down to the photobooth sequence.



Director Bruce McDonald’s The Tracey Fragments uses multiple images and split-screen techniques to bring to life the mental state of a teenage girl, played by Ellen Page. At one point she takes some photos in a photobooth, and we watch as they turn out

And finally, something we’ve been meaning to post for ages and have had no good reason not to: an interview with photobooth artist Daniel Minnick, a friend and contributor to Photobooth.net, on Todd Wemmer’s Lost and Found Photos blog. Thanks to Todd for sending us the link.

Our friend and contributor Klaas Dierks has organized an exhibition of photobooth photos at a gallery in Hamburg. The show, called “Wait until Dry — Identities out of the Booth” brings together the photobooth photo collections of three artists, and opens next week.

The artists Irina Ruppert, Sven Heckmann and Klaas Dierks have collected thousands of photobooth pictures for years and present a selection of them at the „Raum für Photographie” (room for photography) in Hamburg, Germany, from the 5th of June to the 3rd of July 2008. The photos on exhibition were made in photobooths between 1928 and 1988 and originate from all over the world. 

By combining the photos across time and place, the artists instill new meaning in their objects trouvée and let the imagination wander.

Raum für Photographie
Kampstrasse 8
Open Thursday through Saturday 12.00 — 19.30 pm
20357 Hamburg
www.raum-fuer-photographie.de

We encourage our readers in the area to attend and let us know what they see, and we’ll be posting photos from the show courtesy of Klaas next month. 

As many of our readers already know, from the notices it has received in The New Yorker and the New York Times, and mentions on our site and around the web, the book American Photobooth by our friend and colleague Nakki Goranin has been published, after many years of collecting, research, and writing on Nakki’s part. Our copy arrived in the mail today, as did an email about some related events in New York City, both of which we’ll discuss here.

Nakki’s book is a part history, part photo gallery, a lavishly illustrated 220+ pages of photobooth goodness, and anyone interested in the fascinating journey of photobooths from a small town in Siberia to every arcade, boardwalk, and drugstore in America and beyond, should pick up a copy.

The first eighty pages or so detail the history of the booth, from Anatol Josepho’s Photomaton through the various technological iterations and important families who contributed to the evolution of the booth, all the way up to digital booths in the present day. The remainder of the book consists of photos from Nakki’s collection, a wide variety of single photos, photostrips, hand-colored pictures, photomatic frames, photos from every era and walk of life imaginable.

In addition to the aforementioned press, the book has also been featured in The Telegraph, Vermont Public Radio, and People Magazine, among other national and international media outlets. Visit the

Pine Street Art Works blog for more on the opening for the book, held there in February.

For our readers in the New York metro area, this Saturday, May 17th, brings a chance to hear Nakki discuss her book at the Jefferson Market Branch of the New York Public Library (Ave. of the Americas at 10th St.), and a related exhibition of photobooth photos from librarian, artist, and collector Billy Parrott will be on display in the lobby, and will be available through the end of May. We encourage our readers in the area to stop by and let us know how the talk and show go.

American Photobooth will be available for purchase at the talk, and is, of course, available from Amazon and everywhere books are sold, as they say.

Our hearty congratulations to Nakki on a great achievement, and a wonderful resource for photobooth enthusiasts to enjoy for years to come. We know how long you’ve been working on the book, and we’re happy to see it out in the world for all to enjoy.

More European photobooth news this week, as we’ve belatedly posted a little information about a recent project undertaken by Sleep Club, a.k.a. artists Dell Stewart and Adam Cruickshank, at Takt Gallery in Berlin. Simply put, they

…made some flocked Schlaf Klub tshirts and wore them while we slept in six different Photoautomats in Berlin. We took a lot of pictures and made this little installation as a result.

Check out more pictures of the beautiful and gigantic blown-up photostrips on their website. Thanks to Adam for letting us know about the project.

That’s certainly not a word, but I’m sick of using the term “roundup” to describe one of these omnibus photobooth news entries. Maybe I should have just used “omnibus,” actually. Anyway, we’ve found a few brief items of note to relay here, and in the new year, we’ll have more news on the photobooth art front from Spain and Italy. 

• One item that has been circulating the art news blogs recently tells of the work of Joe Heidecker, who used a photobooth to help him cover chairs in photos of design fair goers in Miami. Read all about it on the Dwell blog, and be sure to check out the “Design Miami 2007” video on the New York Times website.

• Max Kozloff’s new history of portrait photography features some photobooth photos, according to a Guardian review:

Kozloff favours anonymous faces and everyday locations: he makes room for discarded strips of photo booth portraits, but not for the celebrated sitters of Karsh, Bailey, Leibovitz or Testino.

• According to a recent LAist post, musician and artist (and photobooth photo collector) Mark Mothersbaugh’s “Rugs During Wartime and Peacetime” exhibition and sale at a gallery in Culver City, California, featured a booth:

They had the requisite trendy photo booth, which we avoided. Everyone’s butt looks fat standing in a photo booth. 

• Photobooth.net reader DaveX’s giant gallery of photostrips shows the wide variety of lighting, contrast, and chemical variables that can have an effect on the final strip. And if you’re into seeing the owner of that same photobooth mugging for the camera, take a look at the gallery of 357 photostrips of the owner, also impressive and fascinating.

We’ve got more information to follow up on our previous note about Irene Stutz and her book Das Einfränklerimperium: Die Geschichte der Schnellphoto AG, or The One-Franc Empire: The History of Schnellphoto AG. Irene was kind enough to provide us with a description of the book in English as well as some images from the book itself.

The book tells the story of Schnellphoto AG, established and lead for many decades by Martin and Christoph Balkes. For one franc per image strip, the brothers provided the whole contry with square passport pictures — their machines became a national cultural treasure, their company a veritable empire of one franc coins. Since the end of 2006, the photo machines have been demolished and scrapped since the special photographic paper is no longer being produced. As analog machines are being replaced by digital ones, the original “snapshot character” is being lost through fun image settings and verbal instructions. But it was exactly the austerity and sobriety of the “photo machines” that triggered the desire for spontaneous self-representation.

The book will be published by Scheidegger & Spiess in Zürich, and it looks like it will be available through the publisher’s website as well as Amazon.de. Tonight, Irene will be having an opening for her new book in Zürich, which qualifies as the coolest photobooth-related event of the year, and we hope to see photos from the evening soon.

Images and text courtesy Irene Stutz

A few items of note in the news recently:

First, a series of photobooth-style portraits taken by royal girlfriend Kate Middleton:

The 25-year-old girlfriend of Prince William was praised as she organised an exhibition by celebrity portrait photographer Alistair Morrison.

The prince showed his support by making a late appearance at the show. The exhibition — The Time To Reflect, at The Shop at Bluebird, in Kings Road — features dozens of Morrison’s celebrity photographs including Tom Cruise, Kate Winslet, Ewan McGregor, Catherine Zeta-Jones and Sting.

Many were taken in a special photobooth installed in the Dorchester Hotel in London and in venues in Los Angeles and New York as part of a project to raise money for the United Nations’ children’s fund, Unicef.

Limited editions of the originals are being sold at the show with half the proceeds going to the charity. All the proceeds from a £60 book of the passport-style images — complete with personal messages from the sitters — will benefit the same cause. 

Also, more bad news for Photo-Me:

Shares in Photo-Me International, the company whose management was earlier this month forced out by angry shareholders, collapsed yesterday as it cut profits forecasts for the year.

Some thoughts from an English writer on passport photos:

I have just had my passport picture done. The result was not a pretty sight and got me thinking.

And a piece on photobooth enthusiast Nakki Goranin and her upcoming book, American Photobooth.

With an introduction written by David Haberstich, a Smithsonian curator of photography, the 224-page tome reveals happy, stern, wistful, goofy or blank facial expressions. Many images convey specific occupations, familial relationships, romantic entanglements and outlooks on life.

The author of the article gets Nakki, but doesn’t necessarily get the current state of photobooths: “Photobooths are still around, in malls and arcades, but now they’re digital.” I guess we’ll be going, then…

Photobooth news from around the country this week, beginning in one of the few states that doesn’t have an entry in our Photobooth Directory: Nebraska. Omaha residents celebrated the recent opening of the new bar/club called Slowdown, part of the massive new Saddle Creek Records development that will include a new art-house theater (Film Streams) as well as restaurants and apartments. They’re probably focusing their enthusiasm on the fact that Slowdown will have a black and white photobooth when it opens this weekend, but we are. Does Omaha currently have a photobooth? Who knows? But according to this Omaha.com article, they will now, and we’re looking forward to getting our first contribution from the great state of Nebraska. (The booth is visible in a few photos in the gallery on Slowdown’s website).

Comedian Patton Oswalt, who can be heard very shortly providing the lead voice in the new Pixar film Ratatouille, is releasing his second comedy album, a follow up to 2004’s “Feelin’ Kinda Patton,” to be called “Werewolves and Lollipops.” Oswalt’s record label, Sub-Pop, is promoting the album by giving away 10 unique, signed photostrips to random winners drawn from among the first 100 people who pre-order the album. The photostrips are the result of a day when “Patton came into our offices and abused our photo booth”; who even knew Sub-Pop had a photobooth? 

Going a little further back, a found photostrip was Found Magazine’s “Find of the Day” for May 27.

And finally, we go still further back, to early May, and ask, What if they threw a photobooth party and we weren’t invited? Well, it happened, though I guess it wasn’t exactly a “photobooth party,” and there really wasn’t any reason for us to be invited. The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art threw their annual “Modern Ball” on May 2, 2007, and according to various photos and accounts, the walls were covered with massive blow-ups of Andy Warhol’s photobooth pictures, and a black and white photobooth was on hand for free photobooth pictures for the attendees. Nice. Thanks to YumSugar for tipping us off with photos of the photostripped walls. Read an account of the party here, and check out the pages of photographer Mona T Brooks, who has photos from the ball for sale, including pictures of the photobooth being used and the photobooth decor that evening.

Photo of Patton Oswalt from subpop.com.

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.