While it’s 99% tedious photos of ‘tweens mugging for the camera in an Apple Store, our RSS feed for Flickr photos tagged with the word ‘photobooth’ still manages to turn up some interesting pictures every once in awhile. Last week, I spotted what looked like a photobooth photo blown up to cover the side of a building, and in contacting the artist, I was happy to find out more about the project, and others like it that he’s been working on over the years.



Pierre Fraenkel’s work often involves the public presentation of found photos, blown up to varying degrees of massiveness. As he describes his latest project, “Unknown little boy,”

I made a collage of an unknown little boy’s ID photograph. In my collages, I very often like showing people I meet, but above all, I like showing unknown people — either old photographs from a flea market or an antique shop, or an ID photograph found on the ground.

I’m fond of the slightly strained and forced smile of the kid. And then, there’s this hand — whose hand is it? His mother’s? From his clothes and his haircut as well as the quality of the photo, I would say the photograph was taken at the end of the 70s.

The project was done for the 2009 KKO Festival in Altkirch, France, and since we first saw the photo, the boy has now been joined by an unknown girl, as well. We’ve got some more info in our Projects section, and much more can be found on Pierre’s website.

UPDATE: For the Francophones among our readers, a local TV news interview story about the project.

Happy 2009 from Photobooth.net. We’ve got some big plans in store for the year ahead, which is somehow our fifth year of existence, unbelievably enough. For now, we’ve got a few bits of news from around the web and around our site to bring to you today.

• The last days of MTV’s TRL Photobooth are documented on MTV.com

• A weekly photobooth contest is held at Orlando’s Bar B Q Bar (from which we still have no listing… Central Florida, I’m talking to you):

It is a known fact that BBQ has the best photo booth. Sure, others have tried, but nothing comes close to this oldie but goodie. Set in the perfect little nook of the bar, complete with a flamingo and a snowman within reach for that rare moment of impromptu posing, this photo booth is the one all the others in Orlando wish to be. Many of my hard earned dollars have been fed into this ‘lil beauty and I am always happy with the result.

• We added a page of photobooth photos from the Kills (right), the most photobooth-obsessed band we know.

• Also new, some interesting photobooth art, minus the photos, as it were.

• Mark Miller was kind enough to send us some samples of his elaborate yearly family photobooth project, which he’s done for more than a decade using Chicago-area photochemical photobooths.

• Photobooth artist and collector Rolf Behme now has a profile on the site; check out his work at his website.

• And finally, a very strange indeed photobooth sequence from the old “Mission Impossible” TV show from Mozinor in France. I’m not really sure what’s going on, but the photos we see are altered and augmented with different people throughout the clip. You’ll need to watch it to really get it.

The Baltimore Sun features a story today about two unlikely friends who met as rookies at the Baltimore Colts training camp in 1955: Raymond Berry, who would win Super Bowls with the Colts and later coach the Patriots to one in 1985, and Leroy Vaughn, who would leave football after a season and become best known as the father of a baseball MVP, Mo Vaughn. They reconnected after 50 years when Berry rediscovered the photo in his belongings. They had taken the photo during their rookie year in the league.

Back then, racism was still rampant in America. Had the picture been taken in the deep South — had a white man and a black man entered a coin-operated photo booth, shared the single stool and closed the curtain — there would have been hell to pay.

But it was during a road trip to Chicago or New York that two first-year players stepped into a Woolworth’s, spent a quarter and forged their friendship on a wallet-sized keepsake.

The photograph featured in the article is definitely a Photomatic, looking at its tell-tale frame, with Berry appearing slightly out of focus for sitting too close to the lens. It’s a great, evocative photo, even if we had no idea who the men were or what their story was.

Last year, when Berry finally tracked him down, Vaughn was stunned to hear his voice.

I was tickled to death to get the call,” Vaughn said from his home in Virginia. “We’re going to get together [soon] this summer, to sit around and reminisce.”

Berry, for one, can’t wait.

“It’s been a long, long time,” he said. “I think we’ll probably laugh a lot.”

Surely they will record their friendship again.

Said Vaughn: “We’ll find one of those old photo booths and have another picture taken — 53 years later.”

Well, gentlemen, you know where to come to find your nearest “old photo booth” location, so good luck!

Photomatic photo, Raymond Berry and baltimoresun.com

From a Gothamist piece this week we learn that MTV is finally shutting down TRL, a.k.a Total Request Live, that staple of the early millennial teen zeitgeist, and the reason America got to know Carson Daly, for better or worse.

TRL’s photobooth, an honest-to-goodness photochemical booth in the land of digital everything, produced thousands of strips commemorating the visits of musicians, actors, athletes, and all-purpose celebrities, many of which were cataloged in the 2002 book TRL Photobooth. Pick up a copy of the book to check out the photos, or browse through the ones collected online at MTV.com.

Our question now is, “Where are those photostrips going?” Hopefully, they’ll end up saved in the MTV archive, or put on display in another MTV building, but let’s hope they don’t get tossed out with the set.

“TRL photobooth wall” photo by Jen Carlson, Gothamist.com

More than two years ago, we mentioned a recent book by the photobooth artist Jan Wenzel titled Fotofix. I didn’t yet have a copy of the book, but promised a review as soon as I got ahold of one. Well, the book came quickly, but the review, obviously, did not.

Better late than never, I say, and don’t let our tardiness in getting to the book encourage you to do the same; Fotofix is a phenomenal collection of some of the most awe-inspiring photobooth art you’ll ever see. Wenzel takes the familiar confines of the photobooth and slowly explodes them with a series of images made up of four or five (or more) photostrips laid next to one another. From the first image, a dresser floating on a green background in five photostrips, through to an entire room rendered in eight parallel photostrips, the reader is left in awe of Wenzel’s absolute control over the space a photobooth affords, and his creativity and ingenuity in conceiving and executing his constructions.



In an excellent essay that opens the book, titled “From the Garbage into the Booth — Or: Instant Pictures of Topsyturvy Everyday Life,” Wenzel tells of how photobooths first came to East Germany after the fall of the wall and the reunification of Germany. The machines got an unprecedented amount of use because “just about everyone needed new photos for passports and I.D. cards, while those who had already been made redundant by the first summer after German Reunification needed pictures for their job-application forms.”

The book is really a must for any photobooth enthusiast; it’s difficult to express the sense of incredulity you get looking through some of the images Wenzel has created, and the work is a testament to the versatility and power of the photobooth. The book is widely available through online booksellers, and is well worth checking out.

As Book Week continues, we bring you another invaluable work from Italy, Professor Federica Muzzarelli’s 2003 work, Formato tessera: Storia, arte e idee in photomatic. Muzzarelli, who is a professor of the History of Photography at the University of Bologna, has written a book that covers the story of photobooths from all angles: the history of portrait photography, the role of the photobooth in the creation of art, the photobooth’s place in popular culture, and the digital future of photobooths, among many other topics.



Without fluent Italian skills, our understanding of the book is naturally less than complete, but a rough translation of the chapter headings, a perusal of the plentiful and wide-ranging sources cited in footnotes, and a glance at the excellent illustrations — from early carte de visites to Marcello Mastroianni, from Duchamp to Benetton ads — make it clear that Muzzarelli’s work is the most rigorous academic survey of the history and significance of the photobooth that we have yet seen.



We hope the book will eventually receive an English translation; until then, it is available for purchase through a variety of online retailers. Thanks to Professor Muzzarelli for her work on this excellent resource, and for getting in touch with us here to share Formato tessera with us.

Covering the world of photobooths as we do from our home base in the United States, it’s often difficult for us to gauge the impact and explore the history of photobooths in other countries. We know about the present-day fotoautomaten around Germany, and about the demise of photochemical booths in Switzerland, and the interesting booths we’ve learned about in places like Helsinki and Kiev, but we don’t have a tangible sense of the depth of influence that the photobooth has had in many places outside our own sphere.

Over the years, though, thanks to enthusiasts and scholars around the world, we’ve been able to learn more about the role of the photobooth internationally. The importance of the photobooth in Italian arts and history in particular has become increasingly clear, and though it seems nearly all photochemical booths have been wiped off the Italian map, we have ample evidence of their historical significance.

Today, we present the first of two Italian photobooth books we’ve learned of recently: Photomatic e altre storie, a collection of works by the photographer Franco Vaccari, with accompanying essays by art historians and critics. I’d first like to thank Marco for letting us know about this book and for sending us a copy as part of an international photobooth book exchange — who knows how long it would have taken us to come across it without Marco’s help.

Franco Vaccari, a photographer who has been exhibiting work in Italy and around the world for more than 40 years, is best known for his “Exhibitions in Real Time,” primarily the piece he exhibited at the Venice Biennale in 1972, “Leave a photographic trace of your passage on these walls.” Visitors to the exhibition found a photobooth in the middle of a room, and were encouraged to take a photostrip and hang it on the wall.

Vaccari also collected submissions of photostrips from ordinary Italians, taken in 700 photobooths all over the country, some of which are collected in the book.



One of the most appealing elements of the book for us is the series of portraits of the photobooths themselves, looking timeless but also very much of their era, in train stations, city centers, and along the side of the road.



If you’re interested in the international history of photobooths, and in the investigations into individuality and identity that Vaccari undertakes, we highly recommend picking up this book, which seems to be available from a number of European booksellers, as well as the publisher.

In the first installment of a week-long look at new and recent photobooth books, we’ve got a copy of Dan Zelinsky and the Musée Mécanique’s wonderful new creation, Lost & Found at the Musée Mécanique. Styled like a pin-bound fan-style book of paint samples, the book is an actual-size reproduction of more than 150 photostrips left behind and collected at the San Francisco institution over the last 35 years.

The Musée, home to mechanical musical instruments, arcade games, fortune-telling machines, and two great black and white booths (1 and 2) began as the collection of Edward Zelinsky, and is now under the care of his son Dan Zelinsky, who assembled this book.

During a trip to the Musée in February, we learned about Dan’s plans for the book, and we’re very happy to see it has become a reality.

You can buy the book in person if you’re in San Francisco (and if you’re passing through, a trip to Pier 45 is a must), or you can order the book on the Musée’s website. Let them know you heard about it here; we don’t get anything out of it, we’re just curious.

It’s time for more updates and a few random tidbits from around the photobooth world: first of all, did anyone out there know that Kenneth Cole made a style of boot named Photo Booth?

Now that that game-changing piece of news is out of the way, on to more relevant things: first, Ted Travelstead’s “Suggested Poses for Photo-Booth Pictures” from McSweeney’s is pretty great. 

They start out small: “(a) Big ol’ cheesy smile, (b) “I am not a crook” face with double peace sign, © Doin’ the funky chicken,” and quickly progress to the very involved: “(a) Peacocking for the paparazzi on the red carpet at the premiere of your cinematic masterpiece, (b) Smoking a cigarette nonchalantly by the pool while half-listening to an eager interviewer, © Sweating profusely, cheap black hair dye running from your graying temples, as you desperately plead for a walk-on role in a C‑movie about a ghost clown so you can afford one more week in a seedy North Hollywood motel.” I’m not quite sure why he chose to list only three at a time, when photobooths come most commonly in strips of four, but that’s beside the point.



We gave up waiting for The Wonder Years to come out on DVD and managed to find another option for getting images from the episode titled “Summer Song,” in which Kevin and his family go to Ocean City and he meets Teri, an older girl who takes a liking to him. They take some photos in a booth, and Kevin cherishes them forever, of course. 

We’ve also added a page for a Danish film titled Mig og mafiaen (“Me and the Mafia”), which turns out to be a remake of Ooh… You Are Awful, right down to the photobooth sequence.



Director Bruce McDonald’s The Tracey Fragments uses multiple images and split-screen techniques to bring to life the mental state of a teenage girl, played by Ellen Page. At one point she takes some photos in a photobooth, and we watch as they turn out

And finally, something we’ve been meaning to post for ages and have had no good reason not to: an interview with photobooth artist Daniel Minnick, a friend and contributor to Photobooth.net, on Todd Wemmer’s Lost and Found Photos blog. Thanks to Todd for sending us the link.

It’s not clear from the article whether or not the Smithsonian Institution has a photobooth (though they certainly should), but the September issue of the institution’s Smithsonian Magazine covers the history of photobooths in a piece titled “Four for a Quarter” (archived on our site here) that is well worth a read. 

In the article, writer Kenneth R. Fletcher talks with Nakki Goranin about her book and discusses the history and future of photobooths. Accompanying the online version of the article are a photo gallery, a short video, and an interview with the author, who discusses writing the piece.

Fletcher mentions Photobooth.net in the piece and in his interview; welcome to all of those who are visiting our site thanks to the article.