We are still digging out more updates that piled up during our summer hiatus, and present a few more today. First, Stephanie was kind enough to check out the new Ace Hotel in New York City, which we reported on in late 2007, wondering whether it would feature a photobooth in its lobby. Our question was answered: like its counterpart in Portland, the Ace New York does have a black and white photobooth, which takes credit cards only and pushes the upper limit of photobooth pricing up to $5.

The new Ace in Palm Springs apparently has a booth, as well, though we haven’t visited there yet, but when we visited the Ace in Seattle a few years ago, there was no booth to be found. Anyway, the photobooth at the Ace Hotel in New York is a welcome addition to the often volatile New York photobooth scene. Thanks, Stephanie.

Back in January, I visted the Motley Coffeehouse in Claremont, California, and checked out their black and white booth, which looked like it turned out great photos, but wasn’t on at the time, as the coffeehouse was actually closed.

And finally, we add another movie to our long list of films featuring faked photostrips, this one the highly anticipated and promptly critically lacerated Fur: An Imaginary Portrait of Diane Arbus, starring Nicole Kidman as the famed photographer.

Late last year, when I was preparing my Photobooths in Cinema talk for the 2009 International Photobooth Convention, our friend Klaas sent us a scan of a photostrip. It wasn’t just any photostrip, though: it was a set of photos by famed German film director Wim Wenders. When Klaas passed the scan on to us, it made for a nice first: the first photostrip we’ve seen of a director who has also used photobooths in his films. I had to take a quick look through Hilhaven Lodge to make sure, but I’m pretty certain. I can hear jaws dropping around the world, I know.

Not only has Wim Wenders used a photobooths in one movie, he’s used them in three: Alice in the Cities, Paris, Texas, and Faraway, So Close!

We thank Mr. Wenders for letting the strip be published, and Klaas for providing it to us.

In other news, we’ve added some more content recently, including a nice piece called “40 Under 40,” by Crain’s Chicago Business magazine, with photobooth portraits by our good friends at 312photobooth.com.

Anthony brought one of his photobooths into the Crain’s studio and had the 40 up-and-coming powerful Chicagoans take photostrips. The strips were used for a giant collage on the cover, for a table of contents, and to illustrate each individual profile.

The new Fox series “Glee” got an early start on the fall season when the pilot episode aired a few months ago. Tim spotted a photostrip in the locker of one of the main characters, and we’ve now got it listed in our TV section.

If you missed the three-episode series Wallander, based on the Swedish crime novels featuring Kurt Wallander by Henning Mankell, we recommend seeking them out, in high-definition, if you can. They were shot using the Red One digital camera, the first UK series to do so, and they look absolutely stunning, in a way that’s really tough to describe.

Two of the three episodes, which star Kenneth Branagh as Wallander, featured photostrips. We added one episode back in June and have now added the second epsiode, with a much more central role for the photostrip.

We’ll have more updates on booth locations, movies, TV shows, and music throughout the week.

Photostrip © Wim Wenders, courtesy of Klaas Dierks

Our trickle of new additions to the site continues, with two new locations and news of a photobooth gallery show, for those of you in the Pacific Northwest. First, thanks to Nathan for our long-awaited first-ever photobooth location in Montréal. We’ve long known of Montréal’s great Metro station photobooths, and even taken a few photostrips (and squares) there in the days before Photobooth.net, but we’ve never had an official submission to the site. Here’s hoping the booth at the Rosemont Metro Station is the first of many.

We received word of a new photobooth location in Portland a few months back, so after much delay, we’re happy to list the black and white booth at the House of Vintage, thanks to Victoria. And speaking of Portland, our friend Myles Haselhorst, whom we first met here in L.A. earlier this year sent us news of a photobooth exhibition that just opened at his gallery, Ampersand Vintage:

Out of the Booth : Photobooth Enlargement from the Robert E. Jackson Collection

July 29th to August 23rd, 2009

For a little over a decade, Robert Jackson has been collecting vintage American snapshots, an activity that culminated in a 2007 exhibition at the National Gallery titled “The Art of the American Snapshot 1888–1978.” The photographs exhibited in that show provided a comprehensive record of all the nuances, anomalies, visual tricks & standard subjects that comprise what one thinks of as a typical (& in some cases, not so typical) American snapshot. The same can be said of Jackson’s collection of vintage photobooth images, the single panels & unclipped strips being suggestive of what he considers the photobooth’s ability to meld a sort of unseen photographic technology with one’s personal aesthetic. Collaborating in the curatorial process with Jackson, our August show features enlargements of 32 pieces from his collection that exemplify the uncanny, self-expressive quality inherent in photobooth images. 

More information here.

And finally, a new film has been added to our list, last year’s Choke starring Sam Rockwell and Anjelica Huston.

As we’re gearing up for the 2009 International Photobooth Convention and a revamped “Photobooths in Cinema” lecture, I’ve added three major examples of photobooths on film from three important European directors. First, a story of a Frenchman in L.A. directed by Jacques Deray, The Outside Man.



Jean-Louis Trintignant joins a cast including Roy Scheider, Ann-Margret, and Angie Dickinson in this story about a hitman who finds himself becoming a target.

Second, thanks to a tip from Klaas Dierks, Wim Wenders’ breakout 1974 film Alice in the Cities.



Rüdiger Vogler plays a writer and photographer who finds himself in charge of a young girl as they try to find her grandmother, somewhere in Germany.

And finally, thanks to an image featured in Federica Muzzarelli’s book Formato tessera, a 1989 film by director Ettore Scola, Che ora è, starring Marcello Mastroianni and Massimo Troisi.



These two giants of Italian cinema play a reunited father and son who talk through their relationship over the course of the film. We’re happy to have these titles added to our list, and are always looking for more, so if you know of something we haven’t listed yet, please let us know.

We’ve posted images from the 1929 Harold Lloyd comedy Welcome Danger, which, along with Lonesome (noted here last month), is one of the earliest films we’ve found yet that features a photobooth. In Welcome Danger, the machine is more of an automatic photo machine without the booth, but the principle is the same, and once again, the photo taken by the machine plays an integral part in the plot of the film.



When a photo taken by Billie (Barbara Kent, who also played Mary in Lonesome) fails to come out of the machine, she walks away. A moment later, Harold (Harold Lloyd) approaches the machine, sits for his photo, and once it has arrived, places it on the drying stand for a moment. After replacing his hat, he looks at the photo and finds that it is a sort of movie fantasy double exposure, with his and Billie’s images neatly superimposed next to one another. He becomes smitten with the girl in his photo, and, as the stills from the film show, he eventually tracks her down.



We now have films featuring photobooths from every decade of the photobooth’s history, the 1920s to the present, missing only one: the 1930s. I’m hoping some eagle-eyed fans of ’30s musicals are keeping their eyes peeled for photobooth appearances. if you spot something please let us know.

For a few years now, we’ve been keeping our eyes out for images from Paul Fejos’ seminal silent film Lonesome, the story of a man and woman who meet, fall in love, become separated, and finally reunited, all in the same day. I’d had a tip from our friend Klaas that the film had a photobooth sequence in it, and finally had a chance to see the film a few years ago, but just this month, I’ve finally managed to get ahold of some images from the film to add to our list the film that has, to my knowledge, the earliest appearance of a photobooth in cinema.



The photobooth, labeled “Auto Photo,” produces a single photo in a circular disc, a product that a number of different photobooth companies were providing at the time. The photo is produced nearly instantaneously in the film, creating a precedent that nearly every film since has followed, as editors ignore the photochemical reality and show the photostrips appearing just seconds after the photos were taken. Lonesome also sets the pattern for the use of the photobooth photo in the narrative structure of the film. First, it is a symbol of the love the two share, a memento of Coney Island, where they met. Later in the film, when they’ve become separated, both Mary and Jim use their photos of each other to show a carnival worker, asking if he’s seen their lost love. And finally, at the end of the film, Jim pulls out his tiny photo of Mary and looks at it longingly, convinced that he has lost the girl he fell in love with that day.

Look at the still images from the film to get a better sense of how the images fit into the movie as a whole. And if you ever have a chance to see the film screened — prints do circulate, both in the United States and Europe — I recommend it highly, not just for the photobooth sequence, but for its compelling and magical artistry. It really is silent cinema at its best.

A weekend visit to San Diego was a bit of a disappointment in terms of functioning photochemical photobooths out in the wild, but it wasn’t a complete loss. First, the bad news: the photobooth at the Corvette Diner has indeed been replaced with a digital booth, and the photobooths at the Waterfront, U 31 and the Ruby Room are all digital. The two photobooths at the Museum of Photographic Arts in Balboa Park are still there, but both were out of order during my visit. The photobooth at the Beauty Bar is also no longer there, which leaves a pretty poor verdict for real photobooths in San Diego. If anyone knows of any we’ve missed, please let us know; we’d love to hear some good news.



The saving grace of our visit was a chance to see photographer Tim Mantoani’s beautiful Model 9 photobooth, which lives in his San Diego studio and is occasionally used for photo shoots and parties.



Tim was kind enough to take time out of his holiday weekend to meet me and let me have a look at the booth — it’s a real beauty, in great working order, and is complete with the top sign, two different sets of advertising inserts for the wraparounds, and the operating manuals.



We first came across Tim’s work in early 2005, when we noted his photobooth-like photoshoot for the 2005 Pro Bowl in Sports Illustrated. We’ve been in touch since, and were happy to have the opportunity to see his photobooth in person. Thanks again, Tim.



We’ve also made a few new additions to our Movies & TV section:

First, filling in a gap in the decades for the 1950s (we now have booth appearances in every decade from the 1920s to the present, save the 1930s…and I know there’s got to be a ’30s musical with a booth out there somewhere…), we’ve got Vincente Minnelli’s The Band Wagon, starring Fred Astaire, Cyd Charisse, and, briefly, a Photomatic photobooth.



Gus Van Sant is in the news thanks to his recent release Milk, Nicole Kidman for her turn in Australia, and Joaquin Phoenix for vowing to be done with acting; once upon a time, they were all working together, in a photobooth, in To Die For.



Further back, we added scenes from a Swedish ski vacation comedy, Snowroller, a Hong Kong shoot-’em-up called Fong juk, Robert Altman’s classic interpretation of the Philip Marlowe story The Long Goodbye, and Agnes Varda’s gritty story of a roaming vagabond, Sans toit ni loi. Four more different films it would be challenging to find, but they all share a photobooth in common.

On the television front, we’ve also had some recent additions: first, some TV shows that feature pseudo-photostrips in their opening credit sequences, The Ex List and ‘Til Death.



Thanks to Klaas, we also added an old episode of the now-defunct Charmed, and thanks to Stephanie, a first-season episode of Pushing Daisies. Another new TV season also seems to always bring a photostrip appearance in a pilot episode; this year it’s The Mentalist.

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.

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.

It seems that for some critics, filmmakers have gone to the well one too many times with the photobooth montage. While we still enjoy seeing the photobooth scene recur in films as a testament to the enduring popularity of the photobooth, it has long been our contention that someone needs to try a new approach to using the booth. In a review of No Reservations on E! Online, Dezhda Mountz writes

From the fumbling-first-kiss scene to the inevitable photo-booth montage (shouldn’t these just be banned forever?), bits of the movie are simply overdone.