We’ve got more information to follow up on our previous note about Irene Stutz and her book Das Einfränklerimperium: Die Geschichte der Schnellphoto AG, or The One-Franc Empire: The History of Schnellphoto AG. Irene was kind enough to provide us with a description of the book in English as well as some images from the book itself.
The book tells the story of Schnellphoto AG, established and lead for many decades by Martin and Christoph Balkes. For one franc per image strip, the brothers provided the whole contry with square passport pictures — their machines became a national cultural treasure, their company a veritable empire of one franc coins. Since the end of 2006, the photo machines have been demolished and scrapped since the special photographic paper is no longer being produced. As analog machines are being replaced by digital ones, the original “snapshot character” is being lost through fun image settings and verbal instructions. But it was exactly the austerity and sobriety of the “photo machines” that triggered the desire for spontaneous self-representation.
The book will be published by Scheidegger & Spiess in Zürich, and it looks like it will be available through the publisher’s website as well as Amazon.de. Tonight, Irene will be having an opening for her new book in Zürich, which qualifies as the coolest photobooth-related event of the year, and we hope to see photos from the evening soon.
Images and text courtesy Irene Stutz
A few photobooth-related projects and other additions to the site: first, we’ve mentioned the Photoboof project before, but we’d like to point out Alex’s photos of the inside of a great old Canadian black and white booth, one of four that was being re-covered for a corporate event. The photos document the inside, the outside, and the mechanical innards of the booth, and are worth a look inf you’ve never seen the chemical baths and spider mechanism.
Secondly, a recent exhibition at the Stockholm Moderna Museet featured the photographs of Carl Johan De Geer, a photographer, artist, and musician who made his own homemade photobooth in the 1960s that allowed viewers to photograph themselves. The resulting photos, more than 300 of which are now in the museum’s collection, depict the artist’s family and friends, as well as artists and musicians, both known and unknown.
And finally, the most interesting photobooth project of late, the John Wilkes Photo Booth. The name says it all; check it out for yourself.
Photo: John Wilkes Photo Booth schematic, boothshotme.com.
Another update of photobooth news from around the world of the arts, from music to museums to found photos, plus a few cases of run-ins with the law:
- Beck’s new album The Information features a lyric about photobooths, as reported in a recent review:
Take a little picture in a photobooth/
Keep it in a locket and I think of you/
Both of our pictures, face to face/
Take off your necklace and throw it away
In 2003, Wearing exhibited five eerie photos of members of her family. We seemed to be looking at snapshots of the artist’s mother and father; a professional headshot of her smiling uncle; a snapshot of her shirtless brother in his bedroom brushing elbow-length hair; and a photo-booth picture of the artist herself at 17.
Across the Channel in France, photobooth (or should we say photomaton) photos are featured at the Centre Pompidou. Thanks to Pat for the tip on these anonymous 1929 photos. Check out this solo photo and this strip as well. (If these links don’t work, search for ‘photomaton’ on the site).
Something we haven’t noted before, a wonderful collection of found photos, more than 200 in all, at SquareAmerica.com, “a gallery of vintage snapshots & vernacular photography.”
On a different note, we have news of more lewdness in the photobooth on the boardwalk in Seaside Heights, New Jersey.
And finally, the story of a rejected passport application based on the photobooth photo the girl’s family provided.
A five-year-old girl’s passport application was rejected because her photograph showed her bare shoulders. Hannah Edwards’s mother, Jane, was told that the exposed skin might be considered offensive in a Muslim country. The photograph was taken at a photo-booth at a local post office for a family trip to the south of France.
Photo: Photomaton, Anonymous 1929. Centre Pompidou
In an article about a digital photobooth that projected photos of attendees on the wall at a Whitney Museum benefit last week, Moby voiced his support of real, honest-to-goodness old-style photobooths. When asked if he took part, he replied,
“No, I didn’t do that,” he said. “There was a long line for it. And I used to go to the photo booth machine…there’s an arcade on Mott Street, way down in Chinatown, that has this great photo booth machine and, it seems, this is nice but sort of a pale imitation to the real thing. I’m sort of a purist, I think.”
Glad to hear we’ve got another ally in the fight to keep dip-and-dunk photobooths alive.
A recent project based in the UK documents the unheralded members of the punk generation, thirty years on, through photobooth pictures. The project, called 100 Punks, draws parallels between photobooths and punk:
Never more so was this the case, than with the punk generation. Like punk, the machines were cheap, instant and easy to operate, once inside, there were no rules, perhaps the only time the subject could be in total control of the image they portrayed to the rest of the world. Each hair colour caught, new relationship captured. Self-concious, self portraits of the not so blank generation.
Check out the project online and in various galleries and museums in the coming year.
Paul Hudson, owner of Lawrence Photo in Lawrence, Kansas, has created a “replica of a curtained photo booth” with a live photographer and the results printed on a postcard, as part of an event called “The Photo Booth Project,” open to the public until September 23. In an article in the Wichita Eagle, Douglas recalls his first time in the booth, saying “I have a strip from a photo booth in El Paso, Texas, when I was about a year old.”
The event opened with a packed reception last month, and has proven to be a popular attraction. As reporter Chris Shull writes,
The photo booth is as American as hot rods and parking lot carnivals. Those closet-sized boxes coax giggling kids and proud parents into a cramped, curtained-off compartment, where a camera captures silly faces and stolen kisses and then dispenses memories in strips of ID-sized photos.
The booth is open during store hours until September 23, and we encourage any Lawrence-area Photobooth.net readers to check it out and send us a report and some photos.
Lifematon, a new French website dedicated to collecting photobooth photos, has been added to our Projects section this week. The site states that its goal is to “collect the largest possible number of photo booth photos. So, no need to throw them away any more, we will just recycle them!
Every month the photo with the most votes from each category will have a “Place of Honour” on the welcome page of the web site for one month.”
The interface for the site is one of its more interesting aspects; photos are arrayed on a field of green grass and the user can move around to find more photos scattered in different directions. It’s a little more fun than useful at this point, but it is an interesting approach. We’re hoping nobody was going to throw their photobooth photos away to begin with, but if you’re interested in feedback, you might try sending one Lifematon’s way.
Another artist has been added to the list here at Photobooth.net, an American painter named Lordan Bunch. Bunch, who has exhibited his work around the world over the last few years, makes small, photo-realistic paintings adapted from old photobooth photos. More info on Bunch can be found at this Davidson Gallery page and this Museum of Contemporary Photography page.
Also added today, Arty Carter’s A Life In A PhotoBooth 1974–1999, now found in our Projects section.
“C.I. 1929” © 2001, Lordan Bunch.
Last year, after reaching what I thought was the end of the line for appearances of photobooths in film documented or mentioned on the web, I started searching with other key words thrown in, so instead of continually searching for “photobooth movie,” I would search for “photobooth script,” or “photobooth scene,” or anything else that might bring me to another mention. Tim came up with the idea of just adding a random word to “photobooth” and seeing what came up as a way to find more obscure and hidden material out there, and I’ve decided to inaugurate this feature today. If it stinks, we’ll stop, but it seems like it might have potential.
I found a few random word generators out there, and chose to use one that creates nouns in particular, though I suppose any kind of word would work fine. The first candidate: plaster. And the first result: well, the first hit is for an entry in none other than this very blog, which brings me to some rules for this exercise: instead of taking the first hit, or even the second, I think it’s probably our prerogative to choose the most interesting of the the first few links rather than stick to any formula.
So, the first qualifying hit for “plaster” comes to us from a February 22, 2006 entry in The Washington Oculus, a blog by Michael Grass of the Washington Post. The entry tells of a recent visit he paid to New York City, where one of his souvenirs was “a strip of photobooth photos (at right), taken from inside a photobooth in someone’s apartment. Where can I get a nifty in-home photobooth?” A pretty solid hit for a first try, I’d say. I’d love to know whose in-home photobooth it is, and this begs a larger question: just how many personal in-home booths are out there (excluding Hollywood)? Having never seen one myself, I’m curious to know. Grass even provides a photo of his photostrip; nice, classic black and white. Oh, and the “plaster” in question came in numerous descriptions of the renovations to the home of the University of Michigan’s daily newspaper, in another entry on the same page. Stay tuned for the next entry and send in any suggestions you have for a better name for our new diversion.
Odile Marchoul, creator of the project she calls La photo-sculpture, has taken a photobooth photo every week since 1999. The photos, always in a set of four square, taken by a digital “Photo-Vision” booth, trace a remarkable timeline of subtle changes, daily moods, and life changing events, from getting a job to having a baby. As Marchoul writes,
it’s a project that i would like to inscribe in time & space, that will grow and change over the years. it’s a picture of my face, a face that is changing. in this project i consider myself as a living ‘subject’, a sculpture that is under construction.
The project has been archived in the Projects section. Thanks to JK for reminding us of it recently.
Photo: “vienna, 16.04.2003 wien-mitte, noon. I’m going to the airport.”
