Thanks to Marc Bellini for getting in touch with us to let us know about an upcoming show of his photobooth art that will be taking place in London next week.

For more information, visit the Bicha Gallery site and check out a PDF of the press release.

If you’re in the area and can attend, we’d love to hear all about it.

We have a raft of updates from our readers over the last few weeks; apologies for the delay in getting all of them rounded up and put up on the site. 

First, a shout out to Guy Capecelatro III, the man behind the fantastic “Some Women” project. If you visited the IPC 2009 in Chicago, you would have seen a selection of pieces by Guy, framed original photos with the moving, evocative captions he creates to suit each photo. In his new book Some Women, he collects 200 of the pieces, which originally appeared in his weekly column inThe Wire, a New Hampshire newspaper. Check out this article about the book in The Wire.

We also came across a Deutsche Welle article on Ole, Asger, and the Photoautomat folks, bringing the photobooth back to European cities. 

We were happy to hear from Dick Jewell recently, belatedly now featured in our Artists section. His “Five time-based photobooth portraits on DVD” from 2007 can be seen in our Projects section. His Found Photos has been listed in our In Print section for some time, now with an updated URL. If anyone has a copy of this extremely rare and influential book lying about, feel free to send it our way…

Thanks to Paula Birch, the woman behind The Strip of a Lifetime project, for letting us know about her pride and joy, a restored and customized black and white photobooth now located at the Cambridge Hotel in Newcastle, New South Wales, Australia.

We’ve also added A Day at the Races, a a new collaborative work by Ginny Lloyd, to our In Print section. The book is available for purchase in hard copy and PDF download.

With the help of Tim in St. Louis and Anthony in Chicago, I got my photobooth up and running in time for our big birthday party. It was a huge hit at the party, and we have a guestbook full of photos and messages from happy party-goers. Having a photograph taken with my daughter wearing a “1” hat on her first birthday made all of the time and effort worthwhile. 

This week, I switched out the roof that the booth arrived with for the more stylish curved roof, still authentic to the Model 14 but not original to this particular booth. 

This weekend, I painted part of the main wall with magnetic paint and gave it a frame to create a board where we can put up all of our photostrips. 

And now I’ve finally got an appropriate home for a gift Tim gave me awhile back, an original photobooth display glass, nicely framed.

Finally, this week I learned from Raul at Foto-Mat that my photobooth wasn’t as new to me as I thought. In fact, almost six years ago, in August of 2005, I sat in this very booth and took a strip of photos when it was located at Big Fun in Cleveland, Ohio. It’s come full circle, this machine.

As we were finishing up construction of the photobooth shed, I had been preparing the pathway — uneven, half dirt, half concrete, and potentially treacherous — for the move-in. When the day finally arrived yesterday for the booth to be delivered, I started the day by heading out to rent the necessary tools: a set of “Roll-or-Kari” piano moving dollies and a J‑Bar, a.k.a. Dutchman Dolly (a.k.a. Johnson Bar or J‑Bar).

I was given a time slot of 8 a.m. to noon for delivery; naturally, the truck showed up at 1:30 p.m. The driver was able to back it up into the driveway, and so began the somewhat frightening process of getting a 900 lb. booth and pallet off the truck using the lift gate. 

After work last night, my friends Keith and Eric came over to lend a hand, and we got to work disassembling the high-quality pallet the booth came on, getting the booth off the pallet, and getting it onto the Roll-or-Karis. From there, it was a pretty straight shot through the gate and down the path into the shed.

Getting the 30-inch wide booth through the 32-inch doorway was tight, but I don’t think we hit anything, and no one lost any fingers, so it was a success. I was surprised, actually, how smoothly it went; we were done just an hour and 15 minutes after we started. We pushed and pulled the booth into the corner of the space, and stood back to admire our work.

Last night and this morning, I worked with Tim over FaceTime to get the transmission aligned (which involved my first problem, first diagnosis, and first bonehead mistake, none of which will be the last), and I’m hoping to get to picture-taking tonight.

Today, I cleaned off all of the old (and conflicting) price stickers, as well as lots of layers of tape, stickers of hearts and cats (where has this booth been?), and some other gunk.

I also moved the sweet late-’60s sign from the right side of the booth against the wall to the left side, where it can be seen in all its glory.

More updates to follow as I make more progress.

It’s always been a bit of an embarrassment that a guy running a website about photobooths doesn’t actually have one of his own. Tim’s got more than a few himself, and after finally buying a house a few years back, it was high time I got my own. When we had our first child last year, the idea sounded even better, and I’ve been working to make it happen. We’re very, very close.

The saga began in April, 2009, just after the end of the last photobooth convention. Our buddy Anthony had a line on a Model 14 photobooth that had lived at the Texas State Fair for many years, and was up for sale. He suggested I buy it and we would fix it up and ship it out. Since then, that booth actually got switched out for a different booth, I suddenly had no time to go on photobooth-fixing jaunts, and Anthony had more than a lot on his plate as well. This month, he finished refurbishing it on the inside, replacing parts big and small and making sure everything worked. Now, more than two years later, the booth is on a truck, on its way from Chicago to Los Angeles.

The second part of the story is the work that I’ve been doing on my end to make our house ready for the booth. It’s not a big place, and having run out of room inside, we decided the best place for the booth would be in its own little space out in the backyard. Next to our shed, we’ve got a strange little space protected by an overhang, which my friend Jeff and I have, over the course of the last two months, transformed into a tiny, photobooth-sized room. We framed the walls, put in a door, added siding, did the electrical, and hung drywall. I’m about to prime and paint, with not much time to spare: the booth is due here in three days. 

The space began like this:

And eventually became this:

And looks like this on the outside (though it will be painted at some point):

Once the space is ready, the next challenge is making sure that the booth can get from the driveway to its new home. A balky gate, an uneven pathway, and a huge lip at the base of the door are all obstacles in the way of a successful move, so I’m trying to make sure we’ve got the right tools (“Roll-Or-Kari” and “Dutchman’s Dolly,” anyone?) and strength in numbers to carry it off. And if that wasn’t enough, my daughter’s first birthday party is next weekend, and if the booth isn’t ready by then, well, I don’t want to think about that. I’ve got my fingers crossed.

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!

As we catch up on what’s been going on while we were out of town, we bring you some bits and pieces from our readers: five new international additions to the site, courtesy of five different folks who got in touch with us.

First, check out Alberto Tanquero’s nice found photobooth image cards over at The Found in Chicago (thanks, Alberto).

We’ve added our first German show, Alles was Zählt, to our listings, with one of many episodes featuring the romance between Deniz and Roman and a few photobooth frames. (thanks, Ricky).

We’ve also added some new photobooth projects, including Paula Birch’s site, “The Strip of a Lifetime”, with tons of photos from Australian photobooths (thanks, Paula).

Also, a lingerie photo shoot in a photochemical photobooth in Italy, courtesy of the Belgian designer La fille d’O (thanks, Marco).

And finally, thanks to the tireless efforts of our Canadian correspondent Meags Fitzgerald, we have four new photobooths listed in the Maritimes, three in Nova Scotia and one in New Brunswick, bringing our total to seven represented provinces (Yukon, I’m looking at you…):

Halifax Shopping Centre

Park Lane Mall

Scotia Square

Champlain Place

Thanks, Meags.

We’d like to thank everyone who contributed, and we encourage others to speak up, drop us a line, and help continue the growth of the site as a photobooth resource for all to enjoy. 

We’re taking a break from the movie and TV updates to report on an upcoming photobooth art show happening in Gainesville, Florida. The show, hosted by Fotomaton.org, is called “Selections 1.1,” and follows on the heels of their “Selections 1” show in December, 2010, which we posted a brief note about after the fact.

The show opens March 7th and will be open for about a month, and features the work of Meags Fitzgerald, Verdi Yahooda, Odile Marchoul, and Jena Ardell.

Artists who are interested in submitting works for future exhibitions can find out more by emailing Aran Graham at aran@fotomaton.org.

Our friends at Chicago’s 312 Photobooth have opened a studio in nearby Oak Park where you can take your picture in a photobooth, peruse their photography-related items for sale, arrange the rental of a booth for your next party, and check out photography on display on their walls.

The studio features multiple working photobooths, including a beautiful Model 11, which we’ve listed in our Photobooth Directory.

Anthony and Andrea and their new digs have been featured in the local press on more than one occasion lately. Read about the 312 Photobooth Studio in the local Oak Park Leaves as well as the TribLocal for Oak Park.

This week, we heard from Olivia Pintos-Lopez, a photographer and photobooth enthusiast in Australia, about a couple of different projects. First, her photoshoot for Small Magazine hich we mentioned yesterday.

She is also behind a project that just concluded at West Space in Melbourne called Picture Yourself:

Analog photo booths are a quintessential, yet vanishing, part of the mall experience. Closing the curtain of a photo booth creates a private space for self-reflection and self-representation in the transitory areas of commercial spaces. For Picture Yourself, Olivia Pintos-Lopez will use the photo booth on the floor above The West Wing to photograph participants and record a three-minute aural portrait as the images develop. The strip of photos will be exhibited as a singular superimposed image. The sound portraits will be presented as anonymous stories that the viewer can listen in on, disconnected from a particular portrait. The resulting portraits will be exhibited in The West Wing and will be added to over the two weeks as more portraits of mall visitors are collected.

We’ve also archived the show in our Projects section, where you can read more about the show in the artist’s words.