A wonderful event ended with some truly exciting talks and demonstrations, plus more group projects and the inevitable goodbyes. Thank you to Marco, Rafa, and their colleagues and families for an amazing weekend! We’ll have a proper wrap-up to come.
Another action-packed day.
The 2023 convention has begun! Thanks to our hosts for a wonderful opening event at the studio last night.
At long last, the 2023 International Photobooth Convention, organized by Autofoto and co-presented by Photobooth.net, will take place in London, July 13–16.
Initially scheduled for June 2020 then cancelled due to Covid, the event is a much-anticipated opportunity to get together with photobooth artists, operators, and enthusiasts from around the world for talks, projects, classes, screenings, and other events focused on analog photobooths.
While the schedule is being finalized, we can note the weekend will include a number of artistic and technical workshops, visits to analog booths around London, and screenings focused on photobooths in cinema, presented by Photobooth.net, including the following:
Saturday, July 13: 12:45 ‘Photobooths in cinema’ talk before 35mm screening of SHIRLEY VALENTINE at the Prince Charles Cinema.
Purchase your tickets for the event via Eventbrite.
More details to come!
We look forward to seeing everyone there!
My last international trip of 2022 meant one more opportunity to catch up with photobooth friends in another European city, this time London.
After the disappointment of the cancelled 2020 Photobooth Convention, it was great to see Marco and Rafa again, and catch up the growing photobooth scene in the capital.
I started things off on the right foot when I discovered that I’d booked a hotel that looked directly out on one of Autofoto’s locations, the Dillons Cafe at the Waterstones on Gower Street. My flight landed at 8 am and by 10, I was in the booth taking a strip of photos.
The next day, I met Marco and Rafa at Coal Drops Yard to check out another of their booths, which was in use when we stopped by (something that happened with almost every booth I visited on this trip). We took a few strips, of course, to document the occasion.
It was great to see them, and to hear about all the work they’ve been doing over the past few years to make London a true photobooth capital of the world. We talked about technical issues, the Russian paper crisis, and of course, the upcoming International Photobooth Convention which was in the works when we talked and has since been officially announced. More on that later…
Marco and I visited the Standard nearby, and I took some strips in the beautiful booth located on the ground floor inside Double Standard, the hotel’s bar and restaurant.
Over the course of my stay in London, I visited two more booths, at the Hoxton Holborn, which had been switched out for a different booth from the one we had previously listed, and the booth at Kingly Court, which was perhaps the most mobbed photobooth I’ve ever seen outside a convention setting.
Rafa and Marco are certainly doing something right, as they’ve found combination of image quality, reliability, and location that make their machines not only popular but beloved. It’s certainly a far cry from my first photobooth trip to the city 20 years earlier, when the last of the analog machines were being removed and and my fiancée and I went on a forced march in the rain to find one of the last existing machines in the wild in a Sainsbury’s in Fulham.
While it’s no longer home to a photobooth on every corner, Chicago still has its fair share of working machines, and a recent trip (thank you, non-stop flights from New Haven to Midway, and thank you, Chicago Film Society!) I got a chance to visit four of them.
It had been awhile since my last visit (on the occasion of the 2104 International Photobooth Convention) and I’d forgotten just how spread out the city is. It was my first trip there with access to a car, so it wasn’t the most conducive time to seek out booths around town, but I managed to find four booths, three of them working, and was happy to revisit some great locations I remembered from my last booth odyssey.
My first stop was the fabled booth at Quimby’s Bookstore, an amazing shop full of unique and wonderful books, comics, zines, and more. Their booth also wins for best and most creative custom signage, which was enough to make up for the disappointment of the booth being out of order.
Just think, if it had been working perfectly, I’d never have seen this beauty of a sign:
From there, I took a bus and walked to the Rainbo Club, a memorable spot which not only has a great booth but is one of my favorite bars anywhere, period. Their annual photobooth calendar is a real treat, and with a donation to the Greater Chicago Food Depository, I picked up this year’s to add to my collection, which now spans three decades.
The booth at the Rainbo Club is still going strong, and was in constant use when I was there. Long live the Rainbo!
From there, I made the trek down to Skylark, one of the other more memorable spots from previous trips. I had a lovely dinner (don’t forget the tater tots) and enjoyed reading a ten year old issue of The New Yorker (it was new to me) at the bar. Their booth has seen an update since I last visited, and I was pleased to see it was functioning well.
Finally, I made a stop at the Holiday Club in Wrigleyville. Their booth is in the same location as last time I visited, but has also changed a bit. Most people there didn’t seem to notice the machine, but I was glad it was still going strong.
Thanks to longtime contributor Stephanie for yet another European photobooth update this year. An April trip to the German capital brought a chance to visit the city’s wonderful variety of booths, with mostly good news. A few locations (Charlie’s Beach, Hardenbergstrasse 22, and Warschauer Straße 47 and Warschauer Straße 47B) that we had listed were no longer there, but for the most part, existing locations were still active since our last report from my 2019 visit.
Stephanie found seven booths that we had listed still up and running, though a few had a somewhat different appearance, including a nice machine at Markthalle Neun with a chalkboard on the outside.
Thanks to Stephanie’s updates, we’ve also added three new booths. First, a booth at Holzmarkt along the River Spree, and next, two side-by-side booths at Mauerpark, one producing horizontal strips, the other making vertical ones, which share a beautiful “Photoautomat” sign that spans the two machines.
Much has been made of late about the demise of the analog photobooth in Canada. While it’s true that the once-thriving Canadian mall and metro station photobooth scene is no more, I was pleased to find two working photochemical machines during two trips to our northern neighbor this summer.
Back in the summer of 2018, I got a tip from our friend Meags to visit North Star Pinball in Montreal, home to a unique colo(u)r booth with a limited life expectancy. I made a pilgrimage with my father and brother, where we took a few strips and I enjoyed pointing out the unique characteristics of this special machine.
I wasn’t expecting the booth to still be kicking four years later, but during my next visit to Montreal in June of this year, I made my way to North Star Pinball, headed upstairs, and found the booth still there, and still in working order. The price of the booth had doubled, from $5 to $10 Canadian over the intervening years (tied with the booth at the Whitney Museum for priciest in my experience), but it was well worth it. Sitting in the booth, one is presented with an informative, rather wistful card explaining the significance of this booth.
One would think I’d never taken photos in a booth before by the way I placed the two strips I took face-to-face in my jacket pocket, but I prefer to think I’d meant to experiment with some direct transfer printing, and now have two color strips, each with traces of the other on it.
I’ll reiterate my advice from 2018: stop by North Star Pinball and take a strip in their booth while you still can.
A few weeks later, a family road trip brought us to Kingston, Ontario, in July, where something truly remarkable happened: for the first time in recent memory, I came across an analog photobooth I wasn’t aware of, completely by chance. For nearly 20 years, any time I’ve traveled, I’ve scoped out photobooth locations in advance and made visiting them a part of every trip. I hadn’t done any such planning for this trip, as I didn’t think there were any locations out there yet to be found.
As we walked around Kingston, though, Aimee spotted a shop, the Antique Emporium, that advertised “Vintage Photobooth Inside” on the front window. I was skeptical, but lo and behold, we found a lovely Auto-Photo Canada booth inside, and took three strips in the few minutes that remained before the shop closed.
Two other booths, neither in working order, could be seen further back in the shop.
Amidst a steady stream of depressing news about the closure of photobooths around the world, it was encouraging to find one known stalwart still producing beautiful color strips, and another heretofore unknown black and white machine quietly making distinctive strips out of the spotlight.
As things have returned closer to normal, I’ve been able to make another visit to a European photobooth capital, this time Florence, Italy. I was the the country for a film festival, the same one that afforded an opportunity for my last visit to the booths of Florence six years ago. This time, though I was sad to miss catching up with Matteo himself, I did manage to visit all five booths currently installed in the city, and in under two hours, no less.
All of the booths are placed in great locations, ranging from right on the sidewalk, to tucked into an exterior wall, to built into the lobby of a hip hotel. Photostrips still cost only €2, as they have for years, and take only one- or two-euro coins (my speed run would have been considerably faster had I not had to look for a café to get an espresso, and change, after starting off at the first location empty-handed).
First off was a new location inside The Student Hotel, not far from Florence’s main rail station. The booth, painted a bright yellow, is visible as you enter the lobby of the hotel, inset beautifully into the wall, up a small flight of stairs at the back of the room.
From there, I made my way to the booth at Via del Proconsolo, under the shadow of the Museo Nazionale del Bargello. From there, it was a short five-minute walk to the booth at Via dell’Agnolo, where I found a customer waiting for his photos to arrive.
From there, I walked along the Arno and crossed to the southern side on the Ponte Vecchio to find the booth on Via Santa Monaca. This dark red booth is set into the wall, facing out onto the sidewalk, and augmented with decorations around the outer edge of the booth. A few of us were waiting to take photos here, and it’s clear this is the iconic photobooth of the city.
On my way back to the train station now, my last stop was at Largo Fratelli Alinari. This booth was busy, as well, with a couple taking a set or two of photos when I arrived.
I made another espresso and change stop while I waited, and after taking my own set of photos, I made my way back to the train station and returned to Bologna. I haven’t mentioned the quality of the images on any of these booths, because they were all uniformly excellent. The only hiccup came in the last booth, which only flashed three times, and left me with a (wonderful) unexposed second frame. Cheers to Matteo for these well-placed and beautifully maintained booths.
In late March, my first post-lockdown international trip brought me to Paris for a film conference and festival, and I was eager to check in on all things analog film-related, both 35mm screening venues and photochemical photobooths. While each of these technologies is wrapped up in scarce equipment and a singular manufacturer of raw materials, they both have passionate enthusiasts keeping the technology alive, and I was very pleased to find six working booths in Paris (and, if you’re interested, eleven different cinemas showing 35mm prints).
From left to right, La Samaritaine, 53 Rue de Trois Freres, and Pavillon Puebla:
Palais de Tokyo, Bonton Filles du Calvaire, and Le Centquatre:
I’ve added three new entries for the booths we didn’t have entries for (Pavillon Puebla, La Samaritaine, and the new booth at Bonton), and include photos of all six booths I visited this week below:
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Special thanks to Virginie and Eddy of Fotoautomat for meeting with me on a busy day at their Montmartre studio, where we talked— about supply chain issues, of course— and caught up since the last time we saw each other five years ago. It’s great to be back in the world, and to catch up with photobooth friends again.