Contributor Meags Fitzgerald sent us a writeup on an exhibition of the Centre Pompidou in Paris with some interest to the photobooth community.

The Centre Pompidou in Paris currently has an exhibition titled “La Subversion Des Images” or “The Subversion of Images”. It is an exhibition of Surrealist photographs and films. The Surrealists were particularly interested in working with the automatic and the spontaneous, so naturally they used the newly invented Photomaton in their artwork. The 1929 issues of “Variétés” and “La Revolution Surréaliste” (Surrealist publications) featured several photobooth pictures of members of the Surrealist movement, the exhibition features dozens of these original photobooth strips. It also has Rene Magritte’s famous “Je ne vois pas (la femme) cachée dans la fôret”, which features 16 photobooth pictures of the most well known Surrealists. The “Subversion of Images” includes strips taken by Andre Breton, Salivador Dali and many others. It is extremely well curated and is worth a visit if you are in the area. The exhibit opened September 23 and runs until January 11, 2010.

No photographs were allowed in the exhibition, this is a photo of one of the exhibit’s publications.

Thanks, Meags!

Henry Ford is the man who brought us assembly lines and mass production (among other innovations). As a result, he seems like the kind of person who would have been fascinated with the photobooth: a self-contained photo developing assembly line used to mass produce snapshots. It is only fitting, then, that the Henry Ford Museum just put a collection of 80 photobooth photos on Flickr.

A few of the photo groupings seem to be from the same strip or of the same subject, which is always interesting to see. Additionally, Suzanne Fischer of the Museum’s staff has posted an entry in the museum’s blog about the photobooth photos.

Mr. Ford passed away in 1947 which would mean the last 20 years of his life were lived in a world with photobooths. I wonder if there are any photostrips of him?

A brief blurb on this collection went out via the Associated Press today.

The European photobooth scene really heating up after some lean years there in the early 2000s… In addition to the projects we’ve mentioned recently in Berlin, the gang from Photoautomat in London are hosting a show of photobooth photos in the month of October:

Photoautomat and the Arch1 gallery space at Cargo are pleased to invite you to the opening of the new exhibition:

EVERYDAY PHOTOGRAPHY

The exhibition is a collection of portraits taken in an old analogue photo booth situated in Cargo’s beer garden.

The opening night is on 5th October- we will be offering a free drink to everyone that arrives at 7pm (subject to availability)

“We at Photoautomat believe that life is what happens outside of our portable electronic devices. Our analogue photo booths breathe life back into everyday photography and we hope they’ll inspire your imagination as much as they do ours.”

For more information, visit their website.

Thanks to Rafael for these photos from the “J’adore aglisia” project we mentioned last week. Looks like fun…

In an article published this week by the Associated Press and picked up by news organizations around the country (and in Canada), writer Ryan Kost takes a look at the current state of photochemical booths from the perspective on the ground at the Ace Hotel in Portland, Oregon, as well as with some words from Tim and myself. 

We’ve posted the article in our In Print section, and while it lasts, the article is available at a number of news outlets’ websites: ABC News, Newsday, OregonLive, Artdaily.org, The Asbury Park Press, the Batavia Daily News, and WRAL from Raleigh, North Carolina, among others. 

We’re curious if the article is actually in print anywhere, and would love to see a copy if anyone has actually held it in their ink-stained hands. Thanks to Ryan for the well-written article (and for not misquoting us), and welcome to those who are visiting us for the first time because of his piece. Have fun looking around!



Photo: AP/Don Ryan

Photobooth artist and long-time friend of Photobooth.net Daniel Minnick is part of a show opening soon in San Francisco called Sweet Believer Exit. The show, which is at 2nd Floor Projects, will have an opening reception this Saturday night September 26, and runs through November 1.

For more information, visit the 2nd floor projects blog. Please let us know if you get a chance to check out the show.

We have news of two photobooth projects happening in Berlin currently. We’ll have more info once they’re completed, but for now, here’s the scoop:

First, Photoautomat.de is taking part in the Berliner Kunstsalon with a project titled “J’adore aglisia”:

J’adore aglisia combines an ecclesiastic confessional and a photo booth in a new, unexpected and modern way. It refers to the well-known advertising slogan “J’adore Dior”; at the same time, it is also a play of words with the French word église (church). The name aglisia is an acronym for the Latin termini of the seven capital sins; therefore, it is an honest commitment to a new religious orientation which states: I covet sin! For a small fee, you can be redeemed from your sins.

For more information (in German), check out their PDF on the project, and visit the Berliner Kunstsalon site for more information on the event as a whole.

Secondly, Patrick Coyle, a London-based artist, will be in Berlin using one of the city’s photochemical photobooths to conduct an interactive project with strangers in the booth.

Patrick Coyle’s intuitive approach to his interactive performances directly contradicts the laboured objects he produces during the event. Often producing obsessively precise visual poetry, the result veers from whimsical ramblings to surreal contemplations. For KOMME, Coyle invites individuals to pose with him in photo-booths around Berlin. His notes written on the developed photos concerning the sitter and his relationship to them will be revealed at the private view. Participants hear Coyle’s comments upon their time together only if they attend the private view at the end of the week.

There’s more information about the project here. The photos will be on display at the gallery at the following address between September 24 and 26, so that the public can see the progress of the project:

ÏMA Design Village

Burstein Ostrowski GBR

12–14 Ritterstrasse

Berlin 10969

We’ll have more information on both of these projects once they’ve concluded, so stay tuned.

Catching up on some old news from late 2008, we heard about an art piece entitled “Photo Booth,” by American artist Lorna Simpson, which was sold to the Tate Modern at the Frieze Art Fair in London for $70,000. In an article in the Telegraph, Jessica Morgan describes the piece.

As curator of contemporary art at Tate, I am on a committee that buys new work every year at Frieze. We have a budget of £125,000 (the money comes from a philanthropic organisation called Outset). This year we bought six pieces. I was particularly pleased to get Photo Booth by the American artist Lorna Simpson, whose work we have been trying to buy for several years. She works predominantly in photography and video.

For this piece she gathered 50 photo-booth portraits of anonymous African-Americans that she discovered in thrift stores in Harlem in New York, where she lives. She matched these with 50 watercolour-and-ink drawings that are subtle and very beautiful, and play off the formality of the photographs. The whole piece cost $70,000, which is a large part of our budget but by no means an unreasonable price given that Simpson is an established artist who has been working since the early Nineties.

You can learn more about the work and see the work on the Salon 94 Freemans website.

Photo Booth © 2008 Lorna Simpson

I was going to title this “Another reason America doesn’t need Jay Leno to stick around any longer,” or simply “Jay Leno is an idiot,” but I thought I’d try to be more charitable. We don’t usually cover much having to do with digital photobooths on the site, but this was too much to pass up. Jamie Lee Curtis was a guest on the Tonight Show last Friday night (starts at about 25:30), and ostensibly brought a photobooth with her to document the event. She asked Jay if they could take some photos together, and the booth, a digital machine labeled “Photo ID New Generation,” was wheeled out.



The first thing Leno says is “Oh, this is a real old-time one, isn’t it?” No Jay, it’s actually the exact opposite of a real old-time photobooth. Nevermind, though; he’s just using that line to set up the “joke” he’s about to unleash next: “You know how I can tell the old-time ones?” And then, pointing to the sample photos on the outside of the booth, he says, “They’re all white kids.” After he’s done laughing at his own joke, everyone’s favorite Jay Leno tick, he follows it with “See apparently, Hispanic and Black people didn’t have photographs back then.” 

It’s hard to know where to begin with this. First, hopefully Leno realizes he’s actually making the joke at the expense of the manufacturer of the modern-day booth, who doesn’t have the excuse that a manufacturer in the 1950s might have had to keep all of the people in the sample photos white. Secondly, it’s clear that “old-time” photobooths, in their heyday, provided a valuable opportunity for people of all races and socio-economic backgrounds to have a photo of themselves and their loved ones, without the expense of a camera or studio portrait. I realize no one is looking to Leno for historical accuracy or insightful observations about photography and society, but it needed pointing out. After the commercial, Curtis mentions that she’ll keep the photostrip as a “keepsake, forever and ever.” Too bad the digital print, which doesn’t look too good to begin with, will be faded by then. Maybe she should have brought in a real photoboooth.

Taking a look at their website, it seems Photo-Me is now Foto-Mat. Outside the U.S., Photo-Me is still Photo-Me, and it looks like the branding transition is still in progress, as the name “Photo-Me” still pops up throughout Foto-Mat’s website. Thanks to Anthony for the tip.