Thanks to Tim Mantoani, a photographer in San Diego who owns a lovely Model 9 photobooth which we visited in 2008, for letting us know about his newest venture, Snap Apparel. This photography-themed clothing shop includes a shirt featuring his booth, so if you can’t visit the machine, you can at least carry a picture of it around with you. 

Thanks also to Les Matons for another gem of a find, an extended sequence in a photobooth from a 1982 film starring one of my favorite French actors, Lino Ventura, called Espion, lève toi.

Check out more stills from this sequence in a Swiss Prontophot booth in our Movies section. Keep your contributions coming, everyone!

The long (and long-awaited) renaissance of the photochemical booth in Europe continues with new booths in Manchester, England and Florence, Italy. Thanks to Paul at Fred Aldous and Matteo with Fotoautomatica for keeping us updated on their latest additions.

The new color photobooth at Fred Aldous joins their lovely black and white machine, which they installed last year. It’s great to see a full complement of black and white and color booths in the north of England. With these booths in Manchester and London covered as well, plus a booth in Dublin, we just need some booths in Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland to round out the Isles.

Fotoautomatica adds to their stable of black and white machines in Florence with a new machine on Via del Proconsolo (pictured at right). We’re excited to see the proliferation of machines in Italy, and we can make a Photobooth.net pilgrimage to visit them some day.

Lou Southgate sent us an update on a project she’s been working on lately, a public photobooth project inspired by the work of photobooth pioneer Franco Vaccari.

After Franco Vaccari, 2013 was produced live at my graduation show last month as a homage to the great Franco Vaccari. With my work responding to amateur practices in photography, the work has always been an interest of mine and it was an amazing experience to make! My audience were invited to place their strip on the gallery wall and this took place across 4 days. The work wouldn’t have been possible without the loan and sponsor of an analogue photobooth by Stuart at Retro-me. Stuart and his team were absolutely amazing throughout the install and take down of the exhibition.

All the strips from the exhibition are currently being scanned and will be put on my website over the next few weeks. Further to this, I have started to curate sets from the strips for a future exhibition on Warren Street, London which opens on the 17th of July 2013.

Thanks to Lou for keeping us updated on her work. 

We have a brief note today about two exhibitions in Europe that feature the photobooth in one way or another. Thanks to Ole and Les Matons for letting us know about the shows. 

First, at the Vögele Kultur Zentrum in Pfäffikon, Switzerland, is a show entitled “Verantwortung: Zum Temperament einer Haltung,” on now through September 22. The J’adore aglisia photobooth project is part of the show. The project, which we covered back in 2009, is a collaboration between RAFAA and Ole Krestchmann.

Not so far away in Vichy, France, Instantanés ordinaries have put on an exhibition of photobooth portraits, on view now through September 1. We’d love to hear from readers who’ve made it to either show to hear more about what they were like. Thanks again to everyone who let us know about these events.

Apologies all around for the recent dormant spell here on the blog. My photobooth focus lately has been on figuring out how to get my own Model 14 photobooth out of the shed and across the country, rather than the larger photobooth world. During the last month, I’ve finished working at my job in Los Angeles and will be heading to Connecticut to start a new job. Photobooth.net West will become Photobooth.net East again, just as I was when this site started almost ten years ago. 

I have a few little additions that have arrived in the last few months to present today, but I haven’t sought out much news, and will continue to be occupied with other things over the next month or so. Needless to say, after a perhaps slightly fallow year for the site in 2013, it looks like 2014 is going to be another busy one here at Photobooth.net. Stay tuned, and we’ll keep you posted.

First, our friend Scot at the Massilon Museum in Ohio sent us a short promo video for their upcoming Warhol exhibition, complete with their lovely black and white photobooth for museum goers to take photos in. 

Next, thanks to Tony for sending us an account of his Portland Photobooth Hunt. It was great to read about his travels around Portland, searching for and using photobooths, using our site as a guide. It reminded me of my Chicago Photobooth Marathon a few years back, though his was a good deal more successful than mine. 

Thanks to Marco for sending in photos from a new photobooth location, the Hoxton Hotel in London. The booth, an Auto-Photo Canada machine, looks right at home. We appreciate the excellent sample photo Marco sent, as well. Slowly but surely, London is returning to the map in terms of photochemical machines, which we’re very happy to see. And speaking of London booths, Time Out London published a guide to black and white photobooths in London. Thanks to Sophie for the tip.

We also heard from our friend Jan Wenzel recently, who let us know about his new solo show at the Klaus Kleinschmidt Gallery in Wiesbaden, Germany. These new pieces were created in a black and white booth, which is a bit of a departure for Jan.

Jan’s show is currently open, and will run through September 20. If anyone goes to see it, we’d love to hear what you think.

Tynjanow | Zwölf Porträts (2012) 8 Automatenstreifen
Diptychon als Unikat (Schwarzweiß)
je 42,0 x 62,0 cm (Rahmen)
Verso Signet + Stempel

As we mentioned last week, Berlin and Los Angeles-based artist Fette Sans held an event this past weekend, Fette’s Photo Booth Party, at the Cha Cha Lounge, home to L.A.‘s best color photobooth

Over the course of the hour or so I was there, more than a dozen people worked with Fette to take strips in the booth that incorporated Fette’s photos, photos those of us brought, and both artist and enthusiast alike. 

I talked to a number of people as we watched, waited, and participated, each of whom was enthusiastic and interested in the workings of the photobooth, and we were all excited by the wonderful quality of the Cha Cha’s pictures. 

Each of us took home our own photostrips from the evening, but I hope at some point we can see scans of the collective work of Fette and her collaborators from this evening. 

Thanks again to Joe for letting us know about the event, and to Fette for letting me sit in and take part. It’s always fun to chat with an articulate and enthusiastic photobooth artist. It was a great evening, and I hope her efforts inspire more photobooth interest and work in the future.

Thanks to Joe for pointing our attention to an event happening in Los Angeles this weekend, Fette’s Photo Booth Party, organized by the Berlin and L.A.-based artist Fette Sans. Using the lovely photobooth at the Cha Cha Lounge, Fette will be photographing participants and their photos in various combinations. In her words,

I have been using photo-booth as a way to blur out intentions and ownership. I print my photographs large enough so they cover the whole range of the photo-booth lens and let them be re-photographed. The result offer this odd quality, something similar to those of found photographs.

With this event, I want to play with the real/fictional by combining people and photographs within the frame, blurring out people and people in photographs… By asking people to bring their own photographs, I also want to remix personal stories by switching photos and people, creating little scenography. 

I plan on being there, and I hope other Los Angeles-area photobooth fans will stop by and participate in the project.

It’s been a busy year for the photobooth. As 2012 comes to a close, we’re taking a look at what the last twelve months have brought in the the world of the venerable photochemical machine, now in its tenth decade of life.

Most notably, this was the year that audiences around Europe got to see the most comprehensive and significant exhibition on the history and art of the photobooth ever produced. Curated by Clément Chéroux, Sam Stourdzé, and Anne Lacoste at the Museé de l’Elysee in Lausanne, the exhibition was titled “Derrière le rideau: L’esthétique du photomaton,” or “Behind the Curtain: The Aesthetics of the Photobooth.” I was honored to be able to contribute to both the printed catalog and the exhibition itself, and I traveled to Lausanne for the opening in February. After Lausanne, the show traveled to Le Botanique in Brussels and then to Vienna, where it remains open for another two weeks at the Kunst Haus Wien.

Back in the U.S., another international photobooth event was on the horizon. Three years after our very successful event in Chicago we hosted another International Photobooth Convention. This time, we gathered two photochemical photobooths and a major collection of world-class photobooth art in the sunny confines of Venice, California, and enjoyed two nights and a day of photobooth fun. Read all about it here.

The 2012 Photobooth Convention led to our first official publication, a 25th Anniversary Catalog celebrating the past and present work of the pioneering photobooth artists who first displayed their art in Rochester, New York in 1987. Limited copies of the catalog are still available for purchase; you can order them here, along with signed and numbered copies of the beautiful poster for the show.

We finished up the convention with a terrifically fun photobooth crawl in a hired van around Los Angeles. 

As we do with every convention, we produced a collaborative project with those who attended. This time, it was a collection of Photobooth Shorts, movies told in just four photobooth frames. We still have a limited quantity of numbered copies left for sale; follow the link to get your copy.

On the site itself, we’ve had a busy year of updates. We continue to discover new photobooth locations ourselves, and learn about them from contributors all over the world. In 2012, we added 48 new photobooth locations, plus countless additions, corrections, and updates to other locations already in our directory.

2012 also proved that the photobooth craze in movies, TV, and print shows no sign of slowing. This year, we’ve added 24 new movies, 22 new albums, 21 new TV shows, 15 new magazine articles, 14 new commercials, 10 new music videos, and six new newspaper articles.

The year also saw 30 entries in our blog, from Jack White’s appearance on ‘American Pickers’ to more recent omnibus recaps of additions to our various collections of photobooth appearances around the world. 2012 also brought our first ever guest blog entry, a travelogue from Meags Fitzgerald about her epic European photobooth adventures. Visit our Archives to poke around the entries from the past year. 

If we can read anything into these stats and highlights, it’s that the photochemical photobooth is alive and well in 2012, thanks to the vibrant and committed community of enthusiasts around the world, many of whom we had the pleasure of meeting this year. 

Best Wishes from Photobooth.net for a joyous, peaceful, productive, and photobooth-filled 2013! (And Happy New Year from two of the youngest members of the Photobooth.net community, both booth enthusiasts in the making)

Next weekend, Anthony Vizzari of A&A Studios and visiting artist Meags Fitzgerald will give the first of three photobooth workshops at A&A in Chicago. Check out the description of each workshop and sign up if you haven’t already. We can’t wait to see some of the work that results from these sessions.

Workshop One: In Front of the Camera : 10/27/2012

This workshop will give you an introductory knowledge of photobooth mechanics and chemistry. A lecture on photobooth art will show you the possible effects you can achieve.We’ll focus on effects you apply before the photos are taken; experimenting with exposures, filters, gels, mirrors, magnification and external light sources.

Workshop Two: Going Beyond : 11/3/2012

We’ll re-contextualize what photostrips can be with a customized backless analog photobooth being built just for this workshop series. (Think…full body photos!) With it we’ll experiment with focus, wide angle lenses and taking photos at a distance. There will be a short lecture on the workshop’s theme so you can start thinking of larger scale pieces.

Workshop Four: Advanced Techniques & Open Lab : 11/10/2012

This open session allows you to plan and produce your own photos, applying all the skills and techniques from the previous workshops. The instructors will be on hand to help you plan and execute your concept. 

The wonderful exhibition of photobooth art and history known as “Derriere le rideau” opens in its third and final location this week, at the Kunst Haus Wien in Vienna, Austria.

The exhibition has been installed, the booth is set up, and the opening reception is tomorrow, October 9. The exhibition will run until January 2013, and we encourage anyone with an interest who hasn’t had a chance to see it in Lausanne or Brussels to take the opportunity now. The photographs and other works collected in the show will never be assembled in such a way again, and it’s a real sight to see for the photobooth enthusiast.

We look forward to hearing updates from those who attend, and we’d love to post photos and reports from the lucky visitors.