Big news in the photoboooth world, as Photo-Me International has sold off its American division, Reuters reports:

Photo-Me, which operates about 21,000 photo booths in railway stations, airports and shopping centres, said the sale of Auto Photo Systems Inc and its unit, Photo-Me USA LLC., would yield a small exceptional profit.

Photo-Me shares gained 13 percent to 13.25 pence at 0928 GMT, valuing the entire firm at about 48 million pounds.

No financial details were provided, but Photo-Me said the U.S. business, which operated 250 photobooths, or about 1 percent of its group total, made a pre-tax loss of 700,000 pounds ($1.39 million) on revenues of 1.2 million pounds in the fiscal year just ended.

Jean-Claude Perrottey, a former employee of Photo-Me, bought the business, the company said.

“The USA has always been a limited market for ID photography and US vending has tended to be loss-making in recent years,” Photo-Me said in the statement.

We’ll see what this means for the 250 booths (a number that’s new to us) in the U.S. operated by Photo-Me. Thanks to Gary for the tip on this. 

We’ve got a lot of photobooth news to get off our desks and into the archive, so we’re putting it all together into one mega-post. First, we start with a video interview on MTV.com with Sub Pop’s vice president, Megan Jasper, as she gives a tour of the offices, including their in-house photobooth, not far from the soda machine that dispenses 75¢ Rainier beer. Nice. We’ve mentioned their booth before, and you can also check out more bands in the photobooth on their blog.

Secondly, we heard from Jeff from Comedy Photobooth, who let us know about the videos of comedians telling jokes inside photobooths — and if you were curious, all of the videos are shot inside photochemical booths. We’ve got the site listed in our Projects section now, and we’ll watch as it grows.

We’ve neglected to mention the ubiquitous Tonight Show “phony photobooth,” a series of videos which show unwitting photobooth-goers being freaked out by a talking photobooth, but it’s out there, and everyone seems to have seen it. Along those lines, we came across another photobooth prank video, in which a woman in a photobooth asks passersby to hold articles of her clothing, and it becomes apparent she’s taking off all her clothes in the booth. The clip seems to have originated on a Fox reality show called “Sexy Cam” (anyone ever heard of it? No? Didn’t think so), and the booth setting looks suspiciously like a mall in Canada.

And speaking of Canada, on an altogether much more interesting note, we caught word of a show in Vancouver called “Requiem for a Photobooth: 3 punk bands, 4 shots, 1 minute of silence,” by the artist Femke van Delft. More information on the project can be found on her site, and on this local blog. The show seems to have ended this past week, and we welcome any more information and first-hand reports on what it was like.

In late 2007, we received an email from director Graham Rathlin, who was working on a short film set in a photobooth and needed a real booth to shoot it in. We helped get him in touch with the folks who manage Berlin’s fine booths, and a few months later, he sent us a link to his finished short, titled Little Snaps of Horror. You can view the film on icewhole.com.

And finally, from the Coincidence Department, we’ve got two “About Us” pages from Chicago-based organizations that use photobooth photos. Now, we know that Chicago is America’s photobooth capital, but even this is a little strange.

First, from skinnyCorp, the folks behind the phenomenon that is Threadless, a page featuring a number of shots from the same booth, which you can see on their site and archived here.

And secondly, the Neo-Futurists’ Ensemble and Alumni page (archived in our Web section), featuring dozens of black and white photobooth photos of past and current members of this Chicago theater collective.

News from Reuters and The Press Association this week of Photo-Me’s continued woes — the company’s stock, which lost 84% of its value in the last year, fell 6 percent more this week — but they are hoping for “one-digit solid profitable growth” next year, in the words of CEO Thierry Barel.

As for the news of more losses, an analyst offered this choice quote:

“The results were just what we were looking for… The photo-booth business just throws off money.”

Hmm. That doesn’t sound good. The Reuters article continues, “[Barel] had considered selling the core vending business, which is suffering as passport agencies move to centralised biometric data collection, but the board had received no acceptable offers.” The failed sale led to losses totalling “£14.8 million of one-off items.” We previously covered Photo-Me’s attempts to sell off its photobooth division in 2006 and 2007.

Barel continued, “There is a risk of further deterioration in photo booths… We decided to accelerate diversification to depend less and less on photo booths.” So, if the booth business “throws off money,” passport agencies are moving away from accepting photobooth photos for identification, and no other companies are interested in buying Photo-Me’s photobooth division, what happens next? What does the future hold for the the thousands of photobooths around the world owned by Photo-Me? 

One person who might have an answer is Hugo Swire, the news chairman of Photo-Me, who is profiled in a recent piece in the Telegraph that is definitely worth a read. 

Our friend and contributor Klaas Dierks has organized an exhibition of photobooth photos at a gallery in Hamburg. The show, called “Wait until Dry — Identities out of the Booth” brings together the photobooth photo collections of three artists, and opens next week.

The artists Irina Ruppert, Sven Heckmann and Klaas Dierks have collected thousands of photobooth pictures for years and present a selection of them at the „Raum für Photographie” (room for photography) in Hamburg, Germany, from the 5th of June to the 3rd of July 2008. The photos on exhibition were made in photobooths between 1928 and 1988 and originate from all over the world. 

By combining the photos across time and place, the artists instill new meaning in their objects trouvée and let the imagination wander.

Raum für Photographie
Kampstrasse 8
Open Thursday through Saturday 12.00 — 19.30 pm
20357 Hamburg
www.raum-fuer-photographie.de

We encourage our readers in the area to attend and let us know what they see, and we’ll be posting photos from the show courtesy of Klaas next month. 

Photobooths have been popping up all over the place in the advertising world lately, and we’re doing our best to keep up with the trend. A few recent additions follow: first, a brief shot of some blown-up photostrips of Ellen Degeneres in a commercial for American Express.



Next, a promotion from Coppertone sun block featuring what they call the “DermaPhoto Booth,” a portable booth that takes a photo of your face that reveals hidden damage to your skin caused by the sun. The booth will be traveling around the country this summer, so you may have a chance to get your DermaPhoto taken and see the scary results.



Today, I caught an ad for E! Entertainment television featuring personalities from their upcoming shows at a carnival, taking part in various activities including posing in the photobooth:



And finally, CBS has been promoting its show “Two and a Half Men” with some ubiquitous bus banners on Metro buses all around Los Angeles; thanks to Aimee for catching this one with her camera:

As many of our readers already know, from the notices it has received in The New Yorker and the New York Times, and mentions on our site and around the web, the book American Photobooth by our friend and colleague Nakki Goranin has been published, after many years of collecting, research, and writing on Nakki’s part. Our copy arrived in the mail today, as did an email about some related events in New York City, both of which we’ll discuss here.

Nakki’s book is a part history, part photo gallery, a lavishly illustrated 220+ pages of photobooth goodness, and anyone interested in the fascinating journey of photobooths from a small town in Siberia to every arcade, boardwalk, and drugstore in America and beyond, should pick up a copy.

The first eighty pages or so detail the history of the booth, from Anatol Josepho’s Photomaton through the various technological iterations and important families who contributed to the evolution of the booth, all the way up to digital booths in the present day. The remainder of the book consists of photos from Nakki’s collection, a wide variety of single photos, photostrips, hand-colored pictures, photomatic frames, photos from every era and walk of life imaginable.

In addition to the aforementioned press, the book has also been featured in The Telegraph, Vermont Public Radio, and People Magazine, among other national and international media outlets. Visit the

Pine Street Art Works blog for more on the opening for the book, held there in February.

For our readers in the New York metro area, this Saturday, May 17th, brings a chance to hear Nakki discuss her book at the Jefferson Market Branch of the New York Public Library (Ave. of the Americas at 10th St.), and a related exhibition of photobooth photos from librarian, artist, and collector Billy Parrott will be on display in the lobby, and will be available through the end of May. We encourage our readers in the area to stop by and let us know how the talk and show go.

American Photobooth will be available for purchase at the talk, and is, of course, available from Amazon and everywhere books are sold, as they say.

Our hearty congratulations to Nakki on a great achievement, and a wonderful resource for photobooth enthusiasts to enjoy for years to come. We know how long you’ve been working on the book, and we’re happy to see it out in the world for all to enjoy.

We’ve got a few updates this week, from the four (or at least three) corners of the media world. First, from mainstream TV, an advertisement that proves you can use a photobooth to sell anything. The Venus Embrace razor is the product in this case, in an ad that encourages women to use the razor and “Reveal the Goddess in You.” In one of a half-dozen scenes in the commercial, two girls go into a pseudo-photobooth and giggle under the heading “Goddess of Friendship.”

From the world of art and photography, we bring a two-page feature and brief interview with us here at Photobooth.net in the internationally-distributed magazine ISM: A Community Project. The piece, called Photobooths: The Art of the Self Portrait. It’s a nice piece, and it’s a great magazine, available at select newsstands or on ISM’s site now; we encourage you to pick up a copy.

And finally, another old photo with with what must be a great story behind it. At the risk of starting up a “Photomatic of the Week” feature, I thought I’d post this eBay gem, because it’s a great photo and a little unusual.



Not only does this Photomatic feature the great “Souvenir of the Nation’s Capital” backing, but the young soldier in the photo is sitting behind a prop with the body of what looks like the cherubic new year of 1941 painted on it, which makes for a great image. Written on the photo itself and mostly faded at this point is the question “Guess Who?”, and on the reverse is written the date “January 13, 42.” This date doesn’t make much sense with the New Year 1941 image, but it’s still a great photo.

Another quick re-cap of photobooths in the news lately…

• I can’t seem to determine if the episode ever aired, as it’s not available on ABC.com or via any other less legal means, but a February taping of Extreme Makeover: Home Edition took place at the Hughes home in Louisville, Kentucky, and a black and white dip and dunk photobooth was installed in one of the boys’ rooms. A Louisville Courier-Journal article describes the home, and an accompanying video shows the booth as an integral part of the photo-centric bedroom.

• Also, thanks to Chris F. for pointing us to the new video from Million Dollar Strong, made up of Mike O’Connell and Yoshido, a.k.a. Ken Jeong, the doctor from Knocked Up. Check out the moments from the video featuring the Bar 107 photobooth in our Music Video section, or watch the video on YouTube.

• The blog at Modern Mechanix has featured two blasts from the photobooth past recently: first, an article about Anatol Josepho from 1928 titled “Penniless Inventor Gets Million for Photo Machine,” and second, a shorter piece about the invention of the Photomatic machine: “New Automatic Machine Delivers Metal-Framed Photos.” It’s great to see these hard-to-find magazine pieces archived, at least for now, on the web.

• And finally, thanks to Tim, each of our photobooth locations now features a nifty Google map right on the location page, to make your photobooth-hunting even easier.

Thanks to all of our readers and friends who pointed us to John Strausbaugh’s article in yesterday’s New York Times. The piece, titled “Coin. Smile. Click!”, focuses on the history of photobooths in Manhattan, mostly through the lens of Nakki Goranin and her new book American Photobooth (which we’ll have a full review of when we get our hands on a copy). Mr. Strausbaugh contacted us prior to the publication of the article, and was kind enough to list Photobooth.net as one of the links in a sidebar to the main piece. 

Read the article online (and be sure to watch the accompanying video). We’ve also archived it here in case it disappears in the future.

Previously, the Times has covered photobooth artists in 2003 and the photobooth scene in Los Angeles in 2005, but I think this is the first time that a photobooth story made the front page of the Times website. 

In what could be called a trend, or just a coincidence, or simply overkill, two recent window displays in Southern California Gap stores (and, presumably, Gap stores around the country) have centered on a photobooth theme. The first, seen in February on the Third Street Promenade in Santa Monica, announced the winners of the “Gap Casting Call,” and featured kids photographed in three poses arranged vertically with a white border — a fake photostrip, but, as I thought at the time, pretty prominent placement of the photobooth idea in an ad campaign. I should have waited a month…



Spotted last week and photographed last night at the Gap store on Wilshire Boulevard in Santa Monica, two window displays featuring Andy Warhol’s photobooth portraits. First, a single shot of Warhol, flanked by some striped polo shirts. And second, four shots of Judith Green (last seen at The Warhol Museum) complemented by a cute red jacket and some peach flared pants. Or whatever they’re called. This particular Gap store featured three sets of these windows, alternating down the length of the storefront, which made an eye-catching display. The photobooth as marketing tool lives on.