In an article about a digital photobooth that projected photos of attendees on the wall at a Whitney Museum benefit last week, Moby voiced his support of real, honest-to-goodness old-style photobooths. When asked if he took part, he replied,

“No, I didn’t do that,” he said. “There was a long line for it. And I used to go to the photo booth machine…there’s an arcade on Mott Street, way down in Chinatown, that has this great photo booth machine and, it seems, this is nice but sort of a pale imitation to the real thing. I’m sort of a purist, I think.”

Glad to hear we’ve got another ally in the fight to keep dip-and-dunk photobooths alive.

First, a piece in the ‘Currents’ section of the Wilmington, North Carolina Star-News asks Where’s the downtown photo booth? The article seems to be a series of small commentaries, but the layout is such that the headline for each section looks like the rest of the body text, so it’s a little hard to read, but among headlines like “What’s worse? Being drunk in public? Or snapping photos of it?” and “Audience Nonparticipation,” about the fact that people haven’t been participating in this particular newspaper column, the author wonders about the lack of photobooths in town:

When I first moved to Wilmington and tried out different downtown bars, I wondered: Where’s the downtown bar photo booth? When I lived in Orlando several years ago, there were quite a few of those classic photo booths in downtown bars, and a constant slew of hipsters wearing scarves in July bucked up to them. I had several friends who had multiple stacks of photo strips at home. I’m talking in the hundreds. They’re like documents, proof, evidence of good time and bad. Plus, it’s fun to make faces and think you’re cool. So, where’s the local booth? I can’t think of a single bar where a photo booth wouldn’t do gangbusters business. It’s something the $1 PBR and $10 martini crowds could really get behind. Somebody needs to get on this.

Next, a poll by Creative Bulletin lists the Hamlet cigar ad featuring “Baldy Man” in a photobooth as the fourth best (British) TV ad of all time. 

Finally, Gridskipper brings us a review of the Daddy Long Legs Hotel in Cape Town, South Africa, whose thirteen rooms are each individually decorated by an artist. One of the rooms, called the Photo Booth, features the work of artist Antony Smyth, who took photos of Cape Town residents with his camera and white backdrop, and used 3,240 images on raised blocks to cover the walls. So while the photos aren’t true photobooth images, this room is a definite must-visit photobooth location.

When I read the title of this article, “£100K Fine for Burns Photo Firm,” I expected the piece to be about a photobooth company named “Burns Photo, Inc.,” or something along those lines. But then I realized that I was reading the article on the website of a British newspaper, hence the uniquely constructed headline, and that there aren’t that many photobooth companies dealing with chemicals these days.

Sure enough, Photo-Me International was fined for forcing workers to “mix toxic chemicals by hand that left them covered in weeping sores. The chemicals were so powerful that workers’ eyelids dried out and cracked, and one man’s fingers were burned so badly he couldn’t do up his shirt buttons without the blistered tips bursting.”

It’s well-known that photobooth chemicals are toxic; it seems inconceivable that Photo-Me wouldn’t give their employees the necessary protection and precautions. They should know better.

When you’re finished with that article, read more pieces with similarly phrased titles like “Honours Cops Quiz Blair Chiefs” and “Sex Cheat Husband Killed Wife.”

Two notable items from the world of eBay this week: first, a framed set of two photos purported to be of a young (18 year-old) James Dean. The photos, dated 1949, feature a Photomat label from the Terminal Arcade in Indianapolis, Indiana, and are described as follows:

In one shot he’s posing serenely, wearing the eyeglasses he needed to combat his extreme myopia, and in the other he is laughing uproariously sans glasses. The pictures measure 2.5″ x 3″ and are in metal frames, as was often the case with booth photos at the time, and are in Fine condition with a little staining and tarnish. From the James Dean Museum archive.

The auction is listed through eBay Live Auctions, and has an estimate between $640 and $960. The current bid is at $160. If you’re a potential bidder, be warned that the bid carries a 22.5% buyer’s premium as well.

Also in progress is an auction for a set of clippings out of a gallery catalog of photostrips of Edie Sedgwick, part of Andy Warhol’s Factory crew and subject of an upcoming film. The auction includes fourteen strips totalling 56 different photos of Edie. We’ll keep our eyes on both of these interesting items.

Photobooth.net’s own resident expert Tim is the author of a recent piece featured on TeachingPhoto, “a newsletter for photography and imaging educators.” The article, titled “The Photobooth: Timeless Self-Portrait Vending Machine,” is a concise history of the photobooth, a survey of artists who use photobooth photos in their work, and an analysis of the state of the traditional photobooth today. Tim has filled the piece with links to nearly every person, company, and event he mentions, and the article will serve as a great quick reference guide for new initiates into the world of the photobooth. The article is also archived on Photobooth.net.

The cover story of this week’s LA Weekly features “emerging artists” with photos of each artist taken in a photobooth. The piece, titled “Afterschool Art,” features black and white photobooth pictures from all of the artistst profiled. For the most part, the photos are real sections of photostrips, though in two cases, the photostrips appear fabricated: Clair Baker’s are staged (square photos rather than rectangular) and Jacob Stewart-Halevy’s photo is a single shot, not a photostrip at all. The other 19 artists play along, with Frank Ryan even bringing his dog in. The photos are included in the online version of the article, though the multi-colored cover of the print edition is quite striking and not available in a viewable size online.

Perhaps the photos were taken in the booth at Lucky Strike Lanes, or at the Edendale Grill, or at the Short Stop, if it’s no longer printing the name of the bar between each photo.

The traditional photobooth is the subject of a brief piece posted in the new sundayheraldtalk, the Sunday Herald’s “new place to debate issues affecting Scotland, the UK and the world.” In the editorial, titled “Life’s a cycle, but nothing this cool will happen again,” Diane Smyth, deputy editor of the British Journal of Photography, chooses the dip-and-dunk booth over the new digital photobooths because of the element of chance inherent in the analog booths:

OK so digital booths allow you to preview your photographs and edit out the dross. But where’s the fun in that? The frisson of excitement as you waited to see what God-awful photographs would drop into the out-tray has gone, overtaken by the control freakery of our image-obsessed society.

Smyth suggests mourning the death of the traditional booth, but if her readers were to follow her link to our very own Photobooth.net, they would find an oasis of photochemical goodness. We appreciate the link, and would offer that mourning is premature as the death of the traditional booth has so far been forestalled. 

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.

This just in from the Dallas Morning News: a free photobooth at the front of the Imperial Palace Casino in Las Vegas is no more. According to the News Travel Column, “This great freebie falls victim to what has been a series of changes and revamps at the center-Strip casino since it was bought by Harrah’s.” We haven’t had any reports from people who have used the booth in the past to know if it was a traditional or digital booth. If anyone has memories of using the booth, please, comment or drop us a line. 

Bloomberg’s Carly Berwick reports on a new exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art that pays tribute to the late Susan Sontag. Sontag’s words are paired with photos she wrote about, and others that illustrate her ideas. Included is a Warhol photobooth strip:

The recently acquired Peter Hujar photograph of Sontag herself, taken in 1975, reveals the writer reclining, relaxed but fearsome. A quote nearby states that “photographs instigate, confirm, seal legends.” Sontag’s words become the occasion for putting the Hujar next to a circa-1963 Warhol photo-booth strip of self-portraits…