We’re sorry to be a little late on this, but if you’re in Paris, you’ve still got one more day to catch it: the Photo-Off Festival is taking place in Paris, and Marc Bellini has a series of photobooth photos on display.

The event is a collaboration with La Joyeuse de Photographie, who provided the photobooth, and La Bellevilloise.

Barbara Kent, one of the last living silent film stars, passed away last week at the age of 103. She starred in films directed by William Wyler and Leo McCarey, and acted alongside such screen legends as Greta Garbo, Edward G. Robinson, and Harold Lloyd. One of her lesser-known claims to fame is the fact that she starred in two of the very first films to feature a photobooth, Lonesome (1928) and Welcome Danger (1929).

In both films, the machine takes a single photo which it returns in a small circular frame; in the case of Welcome Danger, the machine isn’t even really a booth, but still features the same technology and returns the same end product. Of course, the film is a Harold Lloyd comedy, so something manages to go wrong in the process…

Steve Jobs demos Photo Booth, October 12, 2005

We’d like to take a moment to salute Steve Jobs. While we may have silently cursed the fact that soon after it was introduced, the “Photo Booth” application for the Mac filled our searches and Flickr feeds with photos of kids at the Apple Store mugging for the lens rather than the kind of photobooth news and photos we were looking for, this site wouldn’t exist if it weren’t for the devices Steve Jobs created and the creativity he encouraged and enabled. 

The site is coded and designed on Macs and tinkered with over iChat and iPhone, but more generally, I don’t think I’d have the kind of interest in putting together a site like this, and in collaborating with people all over the world to make it better, were I not in love with the tools that we use to make it come together. So thank you, Steve, for the many ways you’ve touched our lives, and for the things you’ve created that help us do what we love with a little more joy and a little more magic. 

Sad news first: thanks to some updates this month, we’ve learned that photochemical booths no longer exist at Corner Mall in Downtown Crossing in Boston and at Wasteland in the Haight in San Francisco.

In other news, Karl Lagerfeld presented a collection of photobooth photos of various celebrities to coincide with the American Foundation for AIDS Research gala, as reported by Harper’s Bazaar and Chanel News.

Check out the selection of photos of celebrities, models, and Lagerfeld himself, as well as Zhang Ziyi, seen here.

And…in other Karl Lagerfeld photobooth news, he seems to have shot a new campaign for Chanel in a photobooth, though we haven’t come across the resulting photos yet.

Thanks to Marco and Ferdinand for letting us know about a recent European public television feature on photobooths. The Metropolis segment on the Arté channel features Photobooth author Raynal Pellicer and our friend and long-time contributor Marco Ferrari. The interview, in German, is on YouTube.

And finally, a long-awaited chapter in my photobooth story will begin soon. This week, my Model 14 photobooth will be making its way from Chicago to Los Angeles, where I’ll be setting it up in a shed a friend and I have been putting together in my back yard. I’ll be providing updates on the setup of the booth as we go along. The race to get the machine in place and working before my daughter’s first birthday party is on!

It’s been a few weeks since we’ve posted about what’s new on the site, so here it is, a little bit of everything. First, a new booth location, The Long Room in Chicago, a booth we’ve long heard of but hadn’t had an official submission yet. Thanks, Chris.

Next up, a terrific late ’60s German photobooth on film:

Thanks to Les Matons for a tip about a classic Fotofix booth in Anthony Mann’s Cold War spy thriller, A Dandy in Aspic.

The fascinating documentary Marwencol features a brief, passing glimpse of a World War Two-era photobooth photo.

We also caught the photostrip appearance in Joe Wright’s latest film Hanna, after receiving tips from Joe and Raul about it. Once the film is out on DVD, we’ll add it to the site.

For photobooth fans in Florida, Fotomaton.org’s “Selections 1.1” exhibition is still on display at Karma Cream in Gainesville. We mentioned it back in February and hope some of our readers have had a chance to visit. If not, you’ve still got time, as the show will run at least into June. Again, the show features works by Meags Fitzgerald (Canada), Jena Ardell (U.S.), Verdi Yahooda (U.K.), and Odile Marchoul (Belgium). Thanks to Aran for the update.

Photobooth photos made the news recently, as the priciest example of photobooth art was sold this month: an Andy Warhol work titled “Self-Portrait.” Brett Gorvy of Christie’s provided some background on the piece in an article titled The Birth of Cool: Andy Warhol, Self-Portrait, 1963–1964.

Andy Warhol’s four-paneled Self-Portrait, 1963–1964, is acclaimed in every Warhol monograph and exhibition catalogue as his first seminal self-portrait. It ranks not only as one of the most iconic and enigmatic portrayals of an artist’s own image, but its multi-panel format and use of mechanically-produced photographic imagery are also acknowledged as the most radical advancements in portraiture since Cubism.

The piece, as was reported in the Wall Street Journal, Vending Times and elsewhere, went for $38.4 million, and, as the Journal noted, a “similar self-portrait comprising a single image from this photo-booth series in red sold for $6.8 million, just over its $6 million low estimate.” All in all, not a bad day for the humble 25¢ photobooth.

Also, thanks to Tim for pointing out my appearance on “Jeopardy!” last month. It was a lot of fun, and though I didn’t have the chance to name drop Photobooth.net, I did get asked by Alex about my proposal to my wife in the photobooth at the Musee Mecanique .

As you may have noticed, we recently battled our way through another security failure that brought our site to a halt for a few days. We thank you for your patience and for bearing with us as we worked to get everything back in order. As always, please let us know about any photobooth news, location updates, or other stuff you think we’d be interested in. 

We were first introduced to Raynal Pellicer when we were contacted for input for an upcoming book about the photobooth. We provided answers to a few questions, and Tim offered some of his artwork, and, as often happens with these long-term projects, we sort of forgot about it for awhile. Eventually, late last year, we began hearing a growing buzz about an upcoming work in both French and English, with its own oft-updated Tumblr full of photobooth images. 

In January of 2011, Photomaton was published. Raynal was kind enough to have the publishers send us each a copy of the book in French, and we were excited to see not only our names and words (and in Tim’s case, his work) included, but more importantly, to see what a fine collection of photobooth history and art Raynal has put together. I haven’t yet gotten ahold of the English edition of the book, but based on the illustrations alone, the book is a real gem. Photobooth photos of all kinds, with unique backgrounds, inscriptions, and Photomatic frames; photobooth photos of artists, photographers, musicians, politicians; and photobooth-related promotional material and advertisements are all included in the book. Artists whose work we were already familiar with (Warhol, Vaccari, Costa, Rideal) is featured, as are works by artists we hadn’t yet come across, including Jose Mesa, Julie Brown Smith, and Giuseppe Colovati.

For both the photobooth enthusiast and anyone interested in the history of photography and art in general, we heartily recommend picking up a copy of this book; it’s a beautifully assembled volume, full of fascinating photos and history. 

The newspapers of Australia’s Fairfax Media Limited have hit the stands today with a one-two punch of photobooth-related stories by reporter Lindy Percival. First, the bad news: in The Age, Percival interviews Melbourne photobooth proprietor Alan Adler in a piece titled “Future of the old photo booth not so picture perfect” (archived on our site here). Adler, who has been running photochemical booths in Melbourne for nearly 40 years, sees the end of the business in sight, saying “We’re having trouble getting paper at the moment. I’ve got a couple of months’ supply and I’m hoping I get some more, but it’s becoming very expensive … We’ll keep going for another couple of years probably. But I’d sooner be playing with my grandchildren than playing with photo booths.” Here’s hoping he keeps up the booths as long as he can; we know those machines have a lot of fans (see our Melbourne listings here, here, and here).

Then, of course, there’s the good news. In a companion piece in the Sydney Morning Herald called “The strip of a lifetime” (archived here), Percival writes about the enthusiasts and artists who are still using the photochemical booths today, with a timely look at Raynal Pellicer’s book Photobooth: The Art of the Automatic Portrait (which we’ll review soon) and a mention of our site as well. Australia’s photobooths are some of the furthest-flung examples of the photochemical machine still in use today, cherished by locals and sought out by visitors, and we hope renewed interest thanks to these articles will help them continue well into the future.

We were pleased this week to get our hands on a copy of Cameron Woo’s new book Photobooth Dogs, a charming collection of photobooth photos of dogs (with and without their owners) spanning the 80+ year history of the invention.

We were first introduced to Cameron, who’s the co-founder and creative director of the dog-centric magazine Bark, when we heard about a collection of photobooth photos of dogs he put together for a 2005 issue of the magazine.

Later on, Cameron asked us for help in finding photos of dogs in photobooths, and though we weren’t able to be of much help, we were excited to hear about his book. Having had a chance to take a look at it, it’s been worth the wait: the book is a wonderful collection of photos, each with a story to tell about the beloved pets they capture.

It’s very nicely designed, features excellent photo reproduction, and intersperses a (very) few choice quotations about dogs between the photos. I especially appreciate the visual guide to sources at the end, for the few photos in the book that aren’t in Cameron’s personal collection.

The book has a page on the Bark website, with a link to buy the book as well.

A few weeks ago, I spotted a bus shelter ad out of the corner of my eye and wondered “Is that a photostrip?” Upon closer investigation, indeed it was, a strange five-frame hybrid strip featured in an ad for Kate Spade. 

Digging a little deeper, we found out that the photobooth in general was included in Kate Spade’s book of “Things We Love” this year, available for browsing in an online version complete with page-flipping animations. 

Clicking around some more, we found another version of the book on the site with links to sites having to do with each item — the trailer for i am Cuba, the terrific photo book Store Front — the Disappearing Face of New York, and the wonderful Movie Title Stills Collection site, to name a few. What do you think happens when you click on the photostrip? That’s right, you’re brought right here to our very own Photobooth Directory. Thanks, Kate, for sending folks our way.

Designer Philippe Starck has created a redesigned Photomaton for Photo-Me International dubbed the “Starbooth,” according to recent French press reports. And according to Photo-Me president Serge Crasniasnki, it’s an improvement on the previous look of the photobooth:

“The photo booth has not changed for 50 years. This is very sexy. The others were very ugly.”

Though there’s nothing particularly offensive with Mr. Starck’s design, I think a number of us would argue that photobooth design in general has changed in the last fifty years, in a direction straight downhill, becoming less attractive and more boring and lifeless with each re-design.

Then again, Mr. Crasnianski used Claudia Schiffer as a reference to describe this new booth; with no disrespect to Ms. Schiffer, Mr. Crasniasnki might be a few decades behind the times to begin with.

See another photo here.