Four directors of Photo-Me International have stepped down this week amid brewing trouble from a major shareholder, according to a BBC News article. Profits at the company have slipped, and a review is underway to determine if the company should split up its divisions, something we’ve covered here before.

Looking ahead, chief executive Serge Crasnianski identified some areas for growth driven by the increasing appetite for ID cards around the world.

He forecast that the introduction of a national health card this year in France could see demand for 50 million photographs, while 25 million photos could be required for tobacco cards in Japan.

Tobacco cards? That’s a new one for us.

Photobooth news from around the country this week, beginning in one of the few states that doesn’t have an entry in our Photobooth Directory: Nebraska. Omaha residents celebrated the recent opening of the new bar/club called Slowdown, part of the massive new Saddle Creek Records development that will include a new art-house theater (Film Streams) as well as restaurants and apartments. They’re probably focusing their enthusiasm on the fact that Slowdown will have a black and white photobooth when it opens this weekend, but we are. Does Omaha currently have a photobooth? Who knows? But according to this Omaha.com article, they will now, and we’re looking forward to getting our first contribution from the great state of Nebraska. (The booth is visible in a few photos in the gallery on Slowdown’s website).

Comedian Patton Oswalt, who can be heard very shortly providing the lead voice in the new Pixar film Ratatouille, is releasing his second comedy album, a follow up to 2004’s “Feelin’ Kinda Patton,” to be called “Werewolves and Lollipops.” Oswalt’s record label, Sub-Pop, is promoting the album by giving away 10 unique, signed photostrips to random winners drawn from among the first 100 people who pre-order the album. The photostrips are the result of a day when “Patton came into our offices and abused our photo booth”; who even knew Sub-Pop had a photobooth? 

Going a little further back, a found photostrip was Found Magazine’s “Find of the Day” for May 27.

And finally, we go still further back, to early May, and ask, What if they threw a photobooth party and we weren’t invited? Well, it happened, though I guess it wasn’t exactly a “photobooth party,” and there really wasn’t any reason for us to be invited. The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art threw their annual “Modern Ball” on May 2, 2007, and according to various photos and accounts, the walls were covered with massive blow-ups of Andy Warhol’s photobooth pictures, and a black and white photobooth was on hand for free photobooth pictures for the attendees. Nice. Thanks to YumSugar for tipping us off with photos of the photostripped walls. Read an account of the party here, and check out the pages of photographer Mona T Brooks, who has photos from the ball for sale, including pictures of the photobooth being used and the photobooth decor that evening.

Photo of Patton Oswalt from subpop.com.

As we remarked about a few months ago, a photobooth that spent many years entertaining beachgoers in Asbury Park, New Jersey, has been on its way back home after 15 years at a store in Vermont.

Bob Crane from Save Tillie was kind enough to let us know that the booth is back just in time for summer and is being enjoyed by a new generation of beachgoers. The photobooth, a black and white Model 14, is located at the Shoppes at the Arcade in Asbury Park. For more information and photos, check out

the page on Save Tillie’s website about the return of the booth.

The photo booth from Asbury Park, New Jersey’s historic Palace Amusements has been returned to the Shore community, 15 years after it was sold to shop keepers in Vermont, and is now a major attraction at a Cookman Avenue store.

For over three decades, the Palace’s photo booth produced strips of four black and white wallet sized photos of visitors to the Shore side amusement park. Now refurbished by the Save Tillie preservation group, the booth is installed on the lower level of The Shoppes at the Arcade, 685 Cookman Ave.

“At a time when so much of the amusements history of Asbury Park is fading into memory, we’re thrilled to be able to bring back one of the Palace’s favorite attractions,” said Save Tillie president Bob Crane. “Photo booths are a timeless treat, and this one especially so for with everyone who enjoyed it at the Palace.”

The booth entered the Palace in the late 1950s and remained in operation there until the Shore’s largest indoor amusement park closed in late 1988. For a time thereafter, it operated at Sandy’s Arcade on the Asbury Park Boardwalk, and eventually was sold to Slim and Pamela Smith, a Jersey Shore couple who had moved to Burlington, Vermont where they operated a clothing store. The Smiths operated the booth in stores in Burlington and Bristol, before donating it to Save Tillie last winter.

Save Tillie member Dan Toskaner refurbished the operating mechanisms of the booth over the winter and spring, giving it a new strobe light and making other mechanical improvements. In appearance, however, Toskaner said the booth will be completely familiar to those who used it at the Palace, down to a collage of very old photo strips including pictures of employes of the Palace and Sandy’s Arcade.

Save Tillie was formed in July of 1998 by fans of Asbury Park, of the Palace and of Bruce Springsteen to save Palace artifacts, including three iconic wall murals, from the wrecking ball. By directive of the State of New Jersey, 35 Palace artifacts, removed when the National Register of Historic Palaces building was demolished several years ago, are in storage and must be reused on a new building that eventually will rise on the Palace lots.

We’re also happy to report that the Palace photobooth is also our first entry for the state of New Jersey. We look forward to more contributions this summer from Jersey Shore-goers out there. Thanks to Bob Crane and Dan Toskaner for the great news and for the photos of the booth and Tillie himself!

We have more than 20 photobooth locations listed in only three cities: New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles. Our to-do list of places we’ve heard about but haven’t had a chance to visit includes locations all around the country, but these three cities seem to be the national photobooth hubs. In the past week or so, I’ve visited two more local L.A. locations, one of which has had a photobooth awhile, Backstage in Culver City, and one of which is a long-standing store that recently added a booth: Pull My Daisy, in Silver Lake.

We’ve also come across news of a new photobooth at Quimby’s, a Chicago bookstore specializing in “the importation, distribution, and sale of unusual publications, aberrant periodicals, saucy comic booklets and assorted fancies as well as a comprehensive miscellany of the latest independent ‘zines’ that all the kids have been talking about.” The Quimblog has some great photos of the booth itself, its innards, and some nice sample photos from their new addition. Anyone visiting Chicago is encouraged to visit Quimby’s, take some samples, and buy some cool books and zines.

On another note, news of another step toward the death of the photobooth as a functional technology, at least in Europe, where dip and dunk photobooths are essentially dead already (more on that later): a new service allowing customers to upload digital photos which will then be checked for “biometric compatibility” and mailed back as a set of four passport-approved photos.

UPDATE 5/25/07: Thanks to Liz from Quimby’s, we’ve now got an entry for their new photobooth in our directory. And with a superstar of the literary world, Dishwasher Pete, in the sample photo. Nice!

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.

As we mentioned last month, hypnotist Derren Brown lured a student into a photobooth in the UK, at which point Brown and his team hypnotized the student, brought him (and the makeshift photobooth) to Marrakech, Morocco, and then woke him up.

A video of the segment, or at least eight minutes of it, is now available on YouTube. The photobooth, equipped with speakers and hidden cameras, is set up near Richard Crichtlow’s flat, and — here’s the convenient, made-for-tv part — he needs to get some passport photos, and steps in. Watch the video for the rest of the mildly entertaining but slightly underwhelming story.

From the world of British tv, we have a story about hypnotism, photobooths, and international air travel. Richard Critchlow, a 21 year-old student, was hypnotized in Wolverhampton London, England by Derren Brown. As this Sky News story explains, Critchlow woke up 13 hours later in an identical photobooth in Marrakech’s Djema al Fna market, more than 1400 miles away in Morocco.

Richard, 21, found himself in a chaotic Marrakech market after sleeping through a 13-hour trip. He stumbled out of a photo booth in the North African state after being hypnotised in an identical one in England. Brown told the Daily Mirror: “He was in a deep sleep. He had no sense of any time passing at all. His profound bewilderment eventually gave way to huge delight.” After being hypnotised, Mr Critchlow from Wolverhampton was whisked off to Heathrow Airport. The student was slumped in a wheelchair as he was put on a plane, flown to Morocco then wheeled through passport control.

I guess I should have stayed in Las Vegas another week: thanks to a comment on a previous post, we’ve seen flurry of black and white photobooth pictures of NBA All-Stars in Las Vegas for the game this past weekend.

The photobooth was at the Palms Casino, for an “All Star Media Availability” event on February 16, and the photos showcase the goofy grins of Shaquille O’Neal, Kobe Bryant, Steve Nash, LeBron James, and other familiar faces. Thanks to Amy for the original comment, which led us to Kevin Garnett, and then to a few Google Alerts that led us to the other photostrips around the web. You can check out seven photostrips here and four others here (with some duplicates).

The photos, as seen on Yahoo! Sports, are credited as “by Jennifer Pottheiser,” (see more of her NBA photos here) which brings up the age-old conundrum of how to credit a photobooth photo. The subject is usually the one who initiates the photographic action by inserting money or pressing a button, but when you get down to it, a machine is taking the photo, and we can credit the subject who pressed the button, the person overseeing the booth, or the whoever grabs the photo out of the slot and scans it.

Photo: Shaquille O’Neal, by Jennifer Pottheiser/NBAE via Getty Images on Yahoo! Sport.

Corel Software, the fine folks who brought you Word Perfect (or at least bought it and revived it) are currently promoting what they call the Corel Snapfire Plus Photo Booth Contest, in which they will be “compiling the world’s biggest photo booth photo strip” through user-submitted snapshots. I hate to be so critical when they’re obviously trying to rustle up interest in their product by tapping into whatever warm feelings people have for the photobooth, but they do such a poor job that we have to point some things out. First, of course, it’s a photobooth-style strip, but it’s sort of strange to say they’re compiling the world’s largest photostrip, when it’s really just an assemblage of digital photos that people send in. Are they really even going to print them in a long strip?

In their statement, they say, “Yes, we want those one-armed self portraits that everyone has taken of themselves at some point. ” So it’s not even really supposed to be in the style of a photobooth shot, but rather in the just-as-recognizable but much newer digital camera self-portrait style, slightly off-kilter but charming.

We want you to send us your photo, and we’ll add it to (what we hope will be) the world’s longest photo booth photo strip!

Are there other photostrips out there that are longer than the traditional strip, like, say, nine or ten inches long? Are they worried they might not make it?

Contest details: Submit your photo showing love, ready to be added to a long line of photographs (just like a good old fashioned photos booth) [sic]. It’s easy!

And the final instruction of the contest:

Visit snapfire.com on February 14th to see yourself as part of the World’s Biggest Photo Booth!

Wait a minute. Are we trying to make the world’s longest strip or the world’s biggest photobooth? Those are two really different things.

And finally,

That’s all there is to it! Keep an eye on Snapfire.com on Valentine’s Day to see you’re [sic] picture as part of the world’s biggest photo booth.

Hmm. We’ll keep our eyes peeled to see what the final photostrip — or photobooth — looks like.

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.