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.
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.
If Defamer thought the Times article was a buzzkill, wait ’till they read what the Orlando Sentinel has to say; let’s just say it involves comparing photobooths to “apple pie and baseball.” Titled “Back in the Picture,” the article in today’s Lifestyle section highlights some Orlando-area booths at Bar-B-Q-Bar and Eye Spy, and interviews the twenty- and thirty-somethings who use them. It also features words from Gary Gulley, once again, as well as Paul Kadillak, Babette Hines, and Nakki Goranin, “author of the forthcoming Photobooth Century: The History and Art of Photobooths of America.” Is this the book we’d been talking about, Tim?
The article mentions the requisite films (though it also manages to keep alive the myth that a photobooth makes an appearance in Parenthood, when it’s actually a photo developing stand) and gives a (very) brief history of the development of photobooths. Thank goodness we’re around to make note of everyone else making note of photobooths, that’s all I have to say.
A recent article in City Pages laments the change in ownership of local Minneapolis/St. Paul musical venue The Turf Club, but notes the “photo booth that launched a thousand romances” will persist. The broken photobooth (experienced by Mr. Meacham in November of 2004) seems to have been fixed (or so says the guy answering the phone there).
In yesterday’s edition of the The Daily Targum, the Rutgers University student newspaper, the Inside Beat section takes a look at photobooths near the New Brunswick, New Jersey campus. The article goes into a bit of photobooth history, and then profiles booths at 7B, Otto’s Shrunken Head, and the Manhattan Mall, all in New York City, as well as an overview of booths on the Jersey Shore. It looks like the author did some good internet research, as elements of the descriptions bear marked similarities to descriptions found in the Doubleperf photobooth listings. So long as it’s not word-for-word, we’ll forgive the liberal borrowing in the name of greater photobooth awareness.
The paper also offered a companion piece that attempts to characterize photobooth images as we might see them in a film or on tv: “Box #1: Confused. How do we work this machine? Crap, I wasn’t ready. Alright, here we go.” Unfortunately, the authors seem to have little experience with an actual photobooth, as they describe photobooth strips as having five photos. I’ve seen some with two and some with three, but most feature the common four photos. Any five-photo booths out there, Tim?
The article continues, “Photo booths, as you will be reading in today’s cover story, are a thing of the past.” I think the point is exactly the opposite; photobooths are everywhere these days, one needs to simply look, or to use a certain online resource as one’s guide.
An Artnet article this week informs us that the Neue Galerie for German and Austrian art in New York has brought in a photobooth to complement their exhibition “Portraits of an Age: Photography in Germany and Austria, 1900–1938.” The $2 black-and-white booth “hails from New Jersey, however, not Weimar-era Germany.” The exhibition, which features more than 100 vintage photographs, runs through June 6, 2005.
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.
A Sunday New York Times article titled “A Night Out With: The Kills: The Power of 2” details the the band’s night in New York. As the article states, “At 7B, they crowded into a photo booth. Poses were struck, pictures were taken and drinks were ordered. The booth spit out a strip of stylish black-and-white portraits that looked as if they had been snapped in 1967.”
See the directory profile for the 7B photobooth.
