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…

Time for another update from the world of photobooth news, from the 1920s, the 1950s, and the 1960s.

• Time magazine’s website has put up the text of an April 4, 1927 article titled “Photomaton,” about inventor Anatol Josepho selling his invention to a “syndicate of men successful enough to know a real gold brick when they see one–including onetime Ambassador to Turkey Henry Morgenthau, President James G. Harbord of the Radio Corp. of America, John T. Underwood (typewriters), onetime Vice President Raymond B. Small of the Postum Cereal Co.” for $1 million. 

• A blog post by Christian Patterson informs us of an exhibit at the gallery of John McWhinnie @ Glenn Horowitz Bookseller titled c/o The Velvet Underground, which commemorates the 40th anniversary of the release of The Velvet Underground and Nico. Included in the exhibition, among various works by Andy Warhol and music and lyrics by the Velvet Underground, are “Original Warhol screen test film stills and photo booth pictures.” The exhibition is open until May 12 at the gallery, located at 50 1/2 East 64th Street in New York. We’d love to have a report on the photobooth pictures if anyone stops by.

• A fascinating story in the Lewiston (Maine) Sun Journal tells the story of a wallet, lost to a mugger in April of 1951 (along with the victim’s pants), that was recently found during the renovation of the Paramount Theater in Boston. The wallet, lost by Val Gregoire on April 11, 1956, was found on April 11, 2007 by Richard Bagen when he tore down a wall in the theater. The wallet was returned to his widow, Jeannette; Gregoire passed away in 2003. In the wallet, “There were several pictures of Val, an 18-year-old Navy sailor at the time. There were images of his mom, friends and a laminated photo of Jeannette, then his best girl. But there also were two pictures — seemingly taken from a photo booth — of Val and another girl. ‘Mine was laminated,’ Jeannette said of her photo, a pretty young girl in pearls. ‘Maybe that meant something’.”

Photo of the contents of the wallet, including four photobooth photos, by Amber Waterman, © 2007 Lewiston Sun Journal.

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

• The Melbourne Photobooth Project at the 2006 Melbourne Fringe Festival gets a review in The Age.

• In the UK, artist Gillian Wearing’s work is profiled in The Guardian:

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

We don’t have an image of the photobooth photo yet, but the Poughkeepsie Journal reports that a new book of photographs called The Kennedy Mystique: Creating Camelot includes a photobooth shot of the future President and First Lady. Among the 150 photos, “Jack and Jackie appear in a photo-booth snapshot from 1953 — he smiling broadly and she appearing more reserved.” 

John F. Kennedy: A Life in Pictures from Phaidon Press also seems to include a photobooth photo of the couple, dated 1956; we’ll keep on the lookout to see if these two photos are the same.

An article in the Philadelphia Inquirer today announces the launch of a new photography website from the Smithsonian Photography Initiative. The article describes a few of the 1,800 photographs now available online, a small fraction of the massive Smithsonian photography collection. Among the photos in this first batch accessible online are photos of an extinct hyena, abolitionist John Brown, Jackson Pollock’s studio, and a photobooth photo of legendary photographer Ansel Adams.

There’s a zany self-portrait of Adams, taken in a photo booth. This 1930 snapshot with his hat pulled down to his eyes contrasts vividly with his open landscapes.

The photograph is from the collection of the Archives of American Art, in the Katherine Kuh Papers.

Photo: Ansel Adams, Photo Booth Self-Portrait, spi.si.edu.

We’ve often thought of assembling a show or book made up of well-known people in photobooth photos, less along the lines of the MTV Photobooth celebrity-fest and more a collection of photos of people before they were well-known, or photos of people you might not expect to have been in a photobooth. Continuing where we left off with the Robert Johnson photobooth story from over a year ago, we’ll take a look at some other faces in history as they appear in photobooth pictures.

These historical figures don’t have much in common, but we’ve gathered links to images of Elvis Presley, John Lennon and Yoko Ono, Anne Frank, and the world’s foremost Surrealists.

Tim told me about this “pre-fame” photo of Elvis Presley; one day I’d like to see it in person, especially without the watermark.

John Lennon and Yoko Ono included a reproduction of a photostrip, visible in this eBay auction, as part of the packaging for their 1969 “Wedding Album.” Apparently, on a side note, a photobooth photo of original Beatle Stu Sutcliffe was included in an exhibition in Liverpool a few years ago, as well.

A photobooth photo of Anne Frank is used as the cover of a book, pictured here. Visit GettyImages for more details on the photo.

Finally, check out the Guardian article about the Surrealists and the photobooth in Paris in the 1920s, and then look at the photos: two frames of a strip of Andre Breton from the Edwynn Houk Gallery, as well as low quality photos of Breton, Magritte, and Buñuel. Also, an article on the auction of those images.

Stay tuned for another installment of “famous people in the photobooth,” and please, send in any links and suggestions.

Legendary blues pioneer Robert Johnson left behind very little physical evidence of his existence when he died in 1938. In addition to the 29 songs he recorded, two known photographs of him exist. One, a portrait of Johnson wearing a hat and holding his guitar, was taken at the Hooks Brothers Studio in Memphis in 1938. The other, discovered by Johnson biographer Steven LaVere in a cedar chest belonging to Johnson’s half-sister Carrie Thompson, is a photo booth portrait. 

Today, the photos are at the center of a legal quagmire that involves Thompson’s heirs, LaVere (to whom Thompson ceded rights of the photos), a man claiming to be Johnson’s son (who has been named sole heir of his estate) and the CBS label, which produced the blockbuster box set of Johnson’s recordings in 1990. Thompson’s heirs have filed suit against LaVere, Johnson’s sole heir Claud Johnson, and Sony Corporation, which bought CBS Records.

Is this the first time a photobooth photo has been at the center of a legal dispute? The case not only involves the photo itself, but gets at the mechanics of 1930s photobooth technology:

The case promises to bring questions about the images to a boil. Mr. LaVere says the miniature photo he found in the trunk is a photo-booth portrait. Ms. Anderson says her sister took it herself with a Kodak, which, if true, could make it easier for her to argue that it doesn’t belong to the Johnson estate.

Nonsense, responds Mr. LaVere, who is unwilling to surrender his copyrights. Photo booths render pictures as mirror images, he says, so that the original pictured the right-handed Mr. Johnson as a left-handed guitarist.

For the moment, that is impossible to verify. Mr. Nevas, Ms. Anderson’s lawyer, said he is “not at liberty to say” where the photographs are. When pressed, he says only: “They’re in the possession of my clients.”

As one of two extant photos of Johnson, the image has been widely distributed and interpreted, and in 1994, became the first photobooth portrait to be turned into a US postage stamp (though not the last). The cigarette that dangles from Johnson’s lips was famously removed at the order of the USPS, an interesting change that is analyzed in great detail in Patricia Schroeder’s excellent 2004 work Robert Johnson, Mythmaking, and Contempory American Culture. In order to accommodate the dimensions of the stamp, Johnson’s guitar and hand are also moved slightly, and the drapery background of the original portrait becomes a wall of shingles in stamp designer Julian Allen’s version.

The photo has been painted, re-enacted, adapted, and painted again. The photo is often cropped, usually nearly square, which causes it to lose the tell-tale look of the photobooth portrait. This colorized version of the portrait gives a good idea of its true dimensions and clipped edges. 

We’ll be waiting patiently to hear the court’s decision in the case, and see who ends up with what may be the most valuable photobooth photo of all time.