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)

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.

Thanks to Birna Kleivan for sending in a number of articles about the photobooth that she’s written in various Danish, Swedish, and English publications over the years. From the article on the photobooth for The Great Danish Encyclopedia to an interview with Jan Wenzel for an English interiors magazine, she’s covered a lot of territory.

Check out our In Print section for all of the new additions. Thanks, Birna!

It’s time to get some of these PDFs, scans, and links sitting in my To-Do folder up on the site in our In Print section. First, thanks to Victoria for letting us know about an article in the magazine Strongbox. It’s a nice piece, and features work and comments from Victoria, Marco, and others about what the photobooth means to them.

More recently, the trip to Switzerland yielded a few pieces for the site: first, the weekend guide section of the Lausanne paper Le Matin featured a nice two-page spread about the Musée de l’Elysee’s photobooth show.

I even had one moment of unexpected photobooth-ness, coming across these photos, taken in the Zürich booth, for Zett Magazine, a publication of the Zurich University of the Arts.

Boston’s Weekly Dig used photostrips on the cover of their nightlife issue back in February.

And thanks to Les Matons for more great contributions from France. This time, they’ve sent in a scan of a comic by Tronchet, showing his character Raymond Calbuth on vacation in a series of photostrips.

We’re just over a week away from the beginning of the 2012 International Photobooth Convention, for which we’re making what can only be described as feverish preparations. The booths are lined up. The shirts are ready. The posters are ready. The art is arriving. The catalog is being printed. The raffle prizes are being gathered. And soon, people will be flying from Paris and Nottingham, from Chicago and St. Louis, to join us in Venice for a weekend of photobooth fun.

While I have a second before full-tilt convention mania hits, I wanted to post about a new location we learned of this week: following quickly on the heels of the news about the new booth at Netil House in London, Paul Walker at the legendary Fred Aldous shop in Manchester let us know about their beautiful Model 17, now installed and working in their shop. We’re excited to learn about a third photochemical machine in the UK, and we hope more will join these three pioneers.

London’s getting a new photobooth, thanks to the gang at Photoautomat. Check out their blog for all of the details on their opening, which will take place tomorrow, Thursday, May 3 at Netil House.

Well, so it’s not quite here, but it’s been designed, it’s beautiful, and it’s going to press this week. We have the talented Jared Purrington to thank for the awesome design (and our buddy Keith to thank for hooking us up with Jared), and L.A.‘s Level Press to thank for the screen printing. The posters will be for sale at the convention next month, and any left over will be available for sale through the website. It’s getting closer, folks…

My how time flies. The 2012 International Photobooth Convention is just a month away.

As the planning goes on behind the scenes, we’ve added a few events to the schedule. The Los Angeles Photobooth Crawl has been on the books for awhile, and on Sunday, I visited eight photobooth locations on a dry run for the event. It’s going to be a lot of fun. Last night, we actually closed registration for this post-convention event, which will happen on Sunday night, May 20. We’ve reached capacity at this point, but will be keeping a wait list, as people’s plans will undoubtedly change in the next month or so. Contact us if you’d like to get on the wait list.

Back by popular demand, Anthony Vizzari of A & A Studios in Chicago will be leading another workshop, in which convention-goers can learn “Alternative Processes in Photostrip Reproduction.” The workshop will be held on Saturday at 4:00 pm, and will focus on the hand reproduction of photobooth photographs. The workshop will be more of a lab than an instructional session, and experimentation will be encouraged. The workshop is limited to 15 participants, and has a $25 fee for materials. Sign up for the event by emailing me.

As part of the convention, we’re assembling what should be a terrific show of photobooth art. As we work on putting that together, we’ve spruced up some of the listings in our Art section. We’ve added a few photos of artists that were missing before, and added some new artists as well. 

We’ve also been working on other sections of the site. We’ve added what is just the third film we’ve found from that photobooth heyday decade, the 1950s. The film is Quicksand, a film noir starring Mickey Rooney (yes, noir Mickey Rooney) and Peter Lorre, who plays a man who runs an arcade on the pier, complete with a Photomatic booth. Thanks to Elisa for the tip.

A remarkable video clip made its way around the web last week showing a man in a nursing home coming to life after hearing some of his favorite music. The clip is from a documentary feature called Alive Inside, and we caught a glimpse of some photobooth photos in one scene.

In the realm of TV, we added scenes from a 1985 episode of the British talk show Wogan, in which guest Liz Rideal talks about her massive photobooth collage project, which is seen on stage. Thanks, Liz!

And finally, I’m a little embarrassed to admit it’s taken me this long, but I’ve finally added two new photobooth locations in my own backyard here in L.A. The Churchill in West Hollywood and Mohawk Bend in Echo Park both feature Photo-Me Model 21s that get a lot of use. We’re always glad to see new booth locations to help balance out the ones that disappear each month. Speaking of, the legendary Lakeside Lounge in New York is closing this month, and they’re looking for a new home for their beloved photobooth. Help keep this photobooth alive and well and in the East Village!

As we settle back in from the Lausanne and Zurich trip and look forward to the 2012 Convention in less than three months, we’re also keeping up with new additions to the site from things we’ve spotted ourselves to the many contributions we receive from our readers every week. Thanks again, everyone, for getting in touch.

First, we’ll start with the moving image. We’ve known about a photostrip appearance in the short-lived Craig T. Nelson show “The District” since we started the site, but never had a chance to get proof. We did some trawling and finally came up with the images from an episode called “Rage.”

Just a few weeks ago, and honest-to-goodness photochemical machine showed up on “Saturday Night Live” when Zooey Deschanel, already an aficionado of the booth both personally and professionally, hosted the show. A sketch called “Bein’ Quirky with Zooey Deschanel” saw Deschanel playing Mary-Kate Olsen, and Abby Elliott playing Deschanel.

We also have new photobooth photo appearances from David Cross’s “The Increasingly Poor Decisions of Todd Margaret” and a documentary called Dr. Bronner’s Magic Soapbox.

After meeting brothers Russ and Greg Goeken in Lausanne, we’re now happy to be able to list their photobooths in our directory: Greg runs the booth at the Shangri-La in Austin, and Russ oversees the booth at the Congress Street Social Club in Savannah, Georgia. 

We’ve heard about some booths in Atlanta over the years, but never had any confirmation (jklax, I’m looking at you), so this booth marks the first booth in our listings from Georgia, and is certainly the only photochemical machine in Savannah. Here’s to many years of success for both booths in these great cities.

We have a number of new books listed, from books made in photobooths to books about photobooths to books that merely mention the machines. First, Paul Yates kindly sent us a copy of his new book, Privacy is a Myth. The book’s Blurb page describes it as “a monograph of Filmmaker Paul Yates’ 25 years of photobooth photography. From Surreal to Sexy, from Degenerate to Intimate–these photobooth strips reveal more about Yates’ personal life than one could imagine. Homeless at 15, already an artist, Yates struggled to find an outlet for his passions…the ubiquitous photobooth machine was his answer!”

Next, we have the photostrip-sized collection called Falten, Fächer by painter and photographer Hansjürg Buchmeier, who I was happy to have met in Lausanne and who is now listed in our Art section.

We added a couple of books with mentions of the booth this week as well: from James Marshall’s well-known “George and Martha” series, the book Tons of Fun features a “Clickopics” photobooth.

The English writer Zadie Smith’s On Beauty features a long, sad, “Baldy Man”-esque sequence in a London photobooth.

Once again, we need to thank Les Matons for more in their steady stream of contributions: this week, they tipped us off to a catalog from a 1985 show about identity photos that features many photobooth works: Identités.

Additionally, they clued us in to the French recording artist Kim, who has used photobooth photos on at least fifteen albums, singles, and E.P.s over the last two decades. We’ve listed as many as we could find (currently at fifteen) in our Music section, from this split single from 1994 to La cuisine selon certains principles from 2001. More information on Kim (born Kim Stanislas Giani in 1977) on his site and on French Wikipedia.

It was a great night for fans of the photobooth as the Musée de l’Elysée’s long-awaited exhibition opened to the public, with a packed house of hundreds of photobooth enthusiasts, photography buffs, historians, artists, and others filled the museum’s three floors and kept the photobooth in the cafe running non-stop. 

I saw a lot of familiar faces in the crowd, some of whom we’ve known for years, others just a few days. It was great to finally meet Marco Ferrari, as well as Les Matons, Helene and Christian, all of whom have been invaluable sources of news and information for the site. It was also great to see Igor again, in a meeting as brief as our first one, last year in Paris.