As part of the 2009 International Photobooth Convention to be held in Chicago in April, we’ll be putting on a group show of art created in and inspired by the photobooth as well as collections of vernacular or found photobooth photos. 

We’ve posted a Call for Entries (PDF) which we encourage you to download and check out if you’re interested in submitting a piece or collection for the show. 

The text of the Call for Entries follows:

2009 International Photobooth Convention Group Show

CALL FOR ENTRIES

The 2009 International Photobooth Convention is now accepting entries for a group show at Center Portion in Chicago, Illinois, to be held April 3–4, 2009. The exhibition seeks to showcase artwork created in and inspired by the photobooth, as well as collections of vernacular or found photobooth photos. The show is open for entry to all artists working in any media, so long as they utilize or reference the photobooth. All entries will be included in an accompanying digital gallery on Photobooth.net, while selected artists will be asked to show their work at Center Portion for the duration of the Convention.

For review by the show’s curators, please submit digital files of your entry. Files should be in jpeg format at 300 dpi. Please provide a short bio, artist statement, and any other pertinent information (in PDF or .doc format). Digital files may be uploaded using the following address:

https://www.photobooth.net/convention/submit

Digital submission entry deadline: March 15th, 2009. Selected artists for the International Photobooth Convention Group Show will be contacted by March 20th with shipping instructions.

Please direct all questions to convention@photobooth.net

We look forward to your contributions to the event.

Photobooth.net and 312photobooth.com are very pleased to announce the 2009 International Photobooth Convention, a two-day event featuring photobooth art, workshops, lectures, projects, and of course, free photochemical photobooths. The event will be held at the Center Portion artist project space in Chicago’s Logan Square, Friday and Saturday April 3rd and 4th, 2009.

We were last involved in the International Photobooth Convention back in 2005 in St Louis, held just a few weeks after we launched Photobooth.net. In the four years since then, we’ve learned a lot and made a lot of connections around the world, which ought to make this year’s event even bigger and better than the last.

The convention is being organized by the same group that put the 2005 event together, Tim and Brian from Photobooth.net and Mr. Mixup, joined this time by Anthony Vizzari of 312photobooth.com, who is graciously sponsoring the event and organizing the event on the ground in Chicago.

We will be sketching out the schedule for the event over the next few weeks, so stay tuned to the convention page for more details as they’re finalized.

We hope some of our readers will be able to join us in Chicago, and for those who can’t, we’ll be updating the blog throughout the event, as well as following what’s going on through our Twitter account, so be sure to follow along if you’re interested.

For those interested in submitting work for our photobooth gallery show, we’ll be announcing our call for entries in the next few days. Please send any questions about the show, or the convention in general, to the convention organizers, and we hope to see many of you in Chicago in April!

In July, we noted an upcoming show of photobooth photos in Hamburg, Germany, called Wait Until Dry, with photos from the collection of Photobooth.net contributor Klaas Dierks as well as two other artists. Klaas has sent in photos from the show as well as an account of the event:

We decided to present 22 frames with series of booth pix that were on one hand arranged rather freely on the grounds of similarity and/or difference, and on the other hand overviews over people during different times, say the 30s, 40s, 60s, 70s.

We also had a series depicting the same person over a period from 1929–1944 in 14 photos. All in all we showed approximately 220 photobooth pix out of a collected 4000.

From left to right: Irina Ruppert, Klaas Dierks, Sven Heckmann selecting the photos for the exhibition

Opening night at the “Raum für photographie.”

View of the exhibition venue

Exhibition-room

Thanks to Klaas for the photos, and we encourage anyone else involved in a photobooth show or anyone who attends one to send us photos and tell us all about it.

As we near the end of Book Week, we’re taking a look at another excellent recent photobooth book from Europe, Irene Stutz’s Das Einfränklerimperium. We covered the book when it was released in December of last year, but it deserves another look now that we have a copy (thanks again to Irene and Tobias for getting the book across the ocean to me).

The book, which originated from Stutz’s thesis project for a visual communications degree from Zurich University of the Arts, tells the history of Schnellphoto AG, the Swiss photobooth company that ran photobooths around the country for more than four decades.

Through essays, photographs, and interviews, Stutz tells the story of Christoph and Martin Balke, the brothers who ran Schnellphoto, from the 1960s until 2007, when the photochemical booths were phased out. Not only is the book a comprehensive history of the company, and of a nation’s relationship with its photobooths, but it contains a stunning series of mostly black-and-white photographs of not only the photobooths themselves, but of everything that made up the world of the photobooths: offices, manuals, equipment, spare parts, maps, charts, letters, and files. Stutz comprehensively documents the world of equipment, paper, and machinery that helped Schnellphoto design, manage, repair, and market the photobooths.

If you are interested in learning about how a photobooth works, and want to learn about the dying art of running a photobooth business, this book is a must, and Stutz’s photos are not only technically and historically illuminating, but they are beautiful portraits in their own right.



The book also includes hundreds of photobooth photos, most in that uniquely Swiss horizontal orientation, as well as advertisements, newspaper articles, cartoons, and other ephemera related to the booths. My German is a little better than my Italian, so the text is a little more comprehensible than in some of the other works I’ve profiled this week, and they are fascinating, on everything from the components of the company — the factory, the patent, the machinery, the paper, and chemicals that combine to make a photobooth — to the role of the photobooth in creating friendships, and the place of the photobooth in the digital world.



The book is widely available online, and is well worth seeking out. It is a testament to Stutz’s devotion to these booths, and to her talent as a photographer and writer, and will stand as the definitive story of photobooths in Switzerland. Let’s hope enthusiasts in other countries are inspired to create similar histories of their own.

Visit the website for the book for more information.

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.

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.

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.

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. 

We’re always happy to help out folks working on photobooth projects, and we’ve received a few (very different) calls lately for photobooth photos. Perhaps some of our readers can help out.

First, Cameron Woo, publisher of Bark magazine, a publication about the “history, art and culture of canines,” is looking for your photobooth photos of dogs. Readers may remember a previous issue of Bark from 2005 that featured dogs in photobooths. This time, Bark is interested in “vintage or, at least, pre-1980” photobooth images of dogs in booths, and readers who would like to submit images from their collection can contact Cameron at cameron [at] thebark [dot] com.

Second, D’arcy French-Myerson, a photobooth artist in San Francisco, is looking for complete photostrips with the following specifications:

“Use a non-digital photobooth (the old-fashioned one with 4 vertical frames). Preferably, use a color booth with a sold background. If in b/w, leave the background white. During each shot, please shake your head as loosely and vigorously as possible without injury. Simultaneously, open your mouth and sigh. Wait for the strip to develop. Please allow it to dry and send me the original:

D’arcy French-Myerson, 1230 Market St. #728, San Francisco CA 94112

You may remain anonymous, or for credit, please write your name on the the back of the strip.”

From Switzerland, where traditional photobooths have recently died off, we received a call for photobooth photos of kids age 12–16 for an English textbook. The pictured student and parents would have to approve the use of the photo, so if you’re interested in getting in touch with the publisher, email us and we’ll pass on the info.

And finally, a project of a different sort, happening this week in San Diego. Jess Jollet writes:

On Thursday March 13th, myself and three other writers here in San Diego will team up with local 60s djs, the Deadbirds, and PhotoBooth rental company PhotoBoof! to host a creative and interactive night at the local bar Whistle Stop. 

We came up with the idea to host an artistic collaborative night surrounding photobooth strips a few months ago. Since then we have been collecting photobooth strips through friends and family, and also bars where people have left their pictures behind. 

Throughout the night the writers will be reading original stories in response to photobooth pictures. The Deadbirds have created a visual that will be a moving collage of the photobooth strips we have collected. Also Gavin from PhotoBoof has generously donated his time and will be bringing his own photo booth to the bar. Everyone will be able to take free pictures. 

The five of us who have been planning the event have had so many interesting conversations and revelations about the magic of a photobooth. The mystery of what happens behind that velvet curtain and the amazing stories in each strip. 

More European photobooth news this week, as we’ve belatedly posted a little information about a recent project undertaken by Sleep Club, a.k.a. artists Dell Stewart and Adam Cruickshank, at Takt Gallery in Berlin. Simply put, they

…made some flocked Schlaf Klub tshirts and wore them while we slept in six different Photoautomats in Berlin. We took a lot of pictures and made this little installation as a result.

Check out more pictures of the beautiful and gigantic blown-up photostrips on their website. Thanks to Adam for letting us know about the project.