A few photobooth-related projects and other additions to the site: first, we’ve mentioned the Photoboof project before, but we’d like to point out Alex’s photos of the inside of a great old Canadian black and white booth, one of four that was being re-covered for a corporate event. The photos document the inside, the outside, and the mechanical innards of the booth, and are worth a look inf you’ve never seen the chemical baths and spider mechanism.
Secondly, a recent exhibition at the Stockholm Moderna Museet featured the photographs of Carl Johan De Geer, a photographer, artist, and musician who made his own homemade photobooth in the 1960s that allowed viewers to photograph themselves. The resulting photos, more than 300 of which are now in the museum’s collection, depict the artist’s family and friends, as well as artists and musicians, both known and unknown.
And finally, the most interesting photobooth project of late, the John Wilkes Photo Booth. The name says it all; check it out for yourself.
Photo: John Wilkes Photo Booth schematic, boothshotme.com.
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.
In commemoration of its 30th anniversary, the Photographic Resource Center has organized the exhibition “PRC | POV — Photography Now and the Next 30 Years.” Much to our delight, Photobooth.net was chosen as one of their featured organizations! The PRC is located in Boston and is a really fantastic organization. Their mission:
The Photographic Resource Center (PRC) at Boston University is an independent non-profit organization that serves as a vital forum for the exploration and interpretation of new work, ideas, and methods in photography and related media. The PRC presents exhibitions, fosters education, develops resources, and facilitates community interaction for local, regional, and national audiences.
If you are in Boston in the next few months, stop by and check out the show. It is up through January 28, 2007.
Another update of photobooth news from around the world of the arts, from music to museums to found photos, plus a few cases of run-ins with the law:
- Beck’s new album The Information features a lyric about photobooths, as reported in a recent review:
Take a little picture in a photobooth/
Keep it in a locket and I think of you/
Both of our pictures, face to face/
Take off your necklace and throw it away
In 2003, Wearing exhibited five eerie photos of members of her family. We seemed to be looking at snapshots of the artist’s mother and father; a professional headshot of her smiling uncle; a snapshot of her shirtless brother in his bedroom brushing elbow-length hair; and a photo-booth picture of the artist herself at 17.
Across the Channel in France, photobooth (or should we say photomaton) photos are featured at the Centre Pompidou. Thanks to Pat for the tip on these anonymous 1929 photos. Check out this solo photo and this strip as well. (If these links don’t work, search for ‘photomaton’ on the site).
Something we haven’t noted before, a wonderful collection of found photos, more than 200 in all, at SquareAmerica.com, “a gallery of vintage snapshots & vernacular photography.”
On a different note, we have news of more lewdness in the photobooth on the boardwalk in Seaside Heights, New Jersey.
And finally, the story of a rejected passport application based on the photobooth photo the girl’s family provided.
A five-year-old girl’s passport application was rejected because her photograph showed her bare shoulders. Hannah Edwards’s mother, Jane, was told that the exposed skin might be considered offensive in a Muslim country. The photograph was taken at a photo-booth at a local post office for a family trip to the south of France.
Photo: Photomaton, Anonymous 1929. Centre Pompidou
In an article about a digital photobooth that projected photos of attendees on the wall at a Whitney Museum benefit last week, Moby voiced his support of real, honest-to-goodness old-style photobooths. When asked if he took part, he replied,
“No, I didn’t do that,” he said. “There was a long line for it. And I used to go to the photo booth machine…there’s an arcade on Mott Street, way down in Chinatown, that has this great photo booth machine and, it seems, this is nice but sort of a pale imitation to the real thing. I’m sort of a purist, I think.”
Glad to hear we’ve got another ally in the fight to keep dip-and-dunk photobooths alive.
A recent project based in the UK documents the unheralded members of the punk generation, thirty years on, through photobooth pictures. The project, called 100 Punks, draws parallels between photobooths and punk:
Never more so was this the case, than with the punk generation. Like punk, the machines were cheap, instant and easy to operate, once inside, there were no rules, perhaps the only time the subject could be in total control of the image they portrayed to the rest of the world. Each hair colour caught, new relationship captured. Self-concious, self portraits of the not so blank generation.
Check out the project online and in various galleries and museums in the coming year.
The cover story of this week’s LA Weekly features “emerging artists” with photos of each artist taken in a photobooth. The piece, titled “Afterschool Art,” features black and white photobooth pictures from all of the artistst profiled. For the most part, the photos are real sections of photostrips, though in two cases, the photostrips appear fabricated: Clair Baker’s are staged (square photos rather than rectangular) and Jacob Stewart-Halevy’s photo is a single shot, not a photostrip at all. The other 19 artists play along, with Frank Ryan even bringing his dog in. The photos are included in the online version of the article, though the multi-colored cover of the print edition is quite striking and not available in a viewable size online.
Perhaps the photos were taken in the booth at Lucky Strike Lanes, or at the Edendale Grill, or at the Short Stop, if it’s no longer printing the name of the bar between each photo.
Bloomberg’s Carly Berwick reports on a new exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art that pays tribute to the late Susan Sontag. Sontag’s words are paired with photos she wrote about, and others that illustrate her ideas. Included is a Warhol photobooth strip:
The recently acquired Peter Hujar photograph of Sontag
herself, taken in 1975, reveals the writer reclining, relaxed but fearsome. A quote nearby states that “photographs instigate, confirm, seal legends.” Sontag’s words become the occasion for putting the Hujar next to a circa-1963 Warhol photo-booth strip of self-portraits…
Ever since owning my first photobooth I have been trying to get a school or church to let me set the booth up on premises and create their yearbook or directory.
Well, as you might have guessed, I am about 36 years too late to claim the “Mr. Originality” prize. Take a look at this 1970 yearbook from Rice University. (Full yearbook here.)
The students really seemed to get into the spirit, resulting in some creative images. Make sure to note the name of the woman pictured on the fifth page of images in the photostrip on the far right. Elton Joan. Nice.
A new addition to the Photobooth.net Art section this week is 29 year-old Japanese artist Tomoko Sawada. Sawada is best known for her piece ID-400, a collection of 400 “single photo-booth images rephotographed, multiplied times four and arranged in squares, then fitted together in framed grids of 100 squares each, adding up to a regular rogue’s gallery of unprepossessing little women.” More can be found on Sawada and her work at the Zabriskie Gallery page for the show.
In addition, we’ve added a 2003 New York Times article to the In Print section. The article describes Sawada’s work, as well as Babbette Hines’ Photobooth book and the booth and show at the Griffin Museum in 2003.
