Over the past five years we’ve collected a lot of photobooth-related stuff, much more than we can get to on a regular basis, and the To-Do List tends to pile up. Over the last week or so, we’ve had a chance to get a whole passel of material online, from TV shows and movies to commercials, print ads, music videos, and photobooth locations. In no particular order, here they are. Enjoy!

A commercial for Fruit Gushers in which kids’ massive fruit-shaped heads make their photobooth tip over.

An episode of “How It’s Made” that shows how a digital photobooth is assembled.

The 1989 Lewis Gilbert film Shirley Valentine, with a railway photobooth sequence.

Low Water’s video for “Sister, Leave Me”. Dave sent me the video and a nice note back in 2008; my apologies for not getting to this for far too long.

The 2008 opening titles of “Neighbors,” now with more pseudo-photoboothiness.

The film Onion Underwater, for which we have only a few images from the trailer.

A few glimpses of a photostrip in an episode of Fringe.

An ad for Will Young’s album Let It Go, as sold by Tesco.

Science World’s Photobooth of Doom.

Wickbold Light Bread from Brazil.

The 2001 animated short fim Autofoto.

And finally, two photobooths in the Helsinki Railway Station, thanks to Marco:

The booths (Helsinki Railway Station II and Helsinki Railway Station III) are located in the west entrance of the station. 

One of these may be the first booth I found in Helsinki in 2005, moved to a new location within the station.

We’ll be back with more goodies in the coming months. 

Please keep your contributions coming, as we continue to build our database of all things photobooth.

While photobooths in the U.S. have had their ups and downs of late, it’s becoming apparent that Europe, once overflowing with photochemical booths but then reduced to extinction just a few years ago, is now coming back in a wonderful way.

This week, we’ve made a number of different additions to our various sections, representing a range of recent developments in the European photobooth scene.

First, Igor sent word of a new photobooth at the Bonton in Paris, “a concept-store dedicated to the universe of childhood.” It’s always great to see another photobooth come to life in Paris (our count is now up to four).

Next, we have a trio of items from Germany: first, an article in the Hamburger Abendblatt, listing the Feldstrasse photobooth as one of 100 must-do experiences in the city. “The machine has achieved cult status in Hamburg.”

Next, in the very same Hamburg photobooth, musical duo Liebe Minou shot a video for their song “Mein Zuhause” inside the booth.

And finally, concert venue Uebel & Gefaehrlich features a few different photobooths in a video they’ve released as a podcast. Nina Persson and her band “A Camp,” Pete Doherty from the Libertines, and a guy named Andreas each take some photos in a booth, while a narrator adds some commentary.



From our friends Martin and Ira at Schnellfoto in Moscow, we have a terrific article about photobooths, published in a recent issue of the Russian magazine Foto & Video.

Martin and Ira’s article covers, as far as we can tell, the history of the booth, information about their booth, as well as photobooths in art and a great technical look inside a dip and dunk booth. Thanks so much to Martin for sending us copies of the magazine. 

And finally, we’ve been cleaning out our “To-Do” list lately and finally got around to posting an entry for

our appearance on the BBC web show “Click” a few years ago. We mentioned it here when it first came out in 2007, but now we’ve got screengrabs, crummy as they are, and we’ve immortalized the host’s opinion of Photobooth.net as a “wonderfully pointless site.”

We’ve made a bit of a dent in the backlog of material to add to the site, and have a little batch of photobooth sightings to present.

First, we revisit the film Management. We spotted a photostrip in the trailer, and though there’s not much more in the film itself, we’ve updated the entry.

We’ve also added a clever advertisement found on the side of a photobooth in Germany:

Last summer, we got wind of an ABC News webcast featuring a review of the new Arctic Monkeys album, illustrated with photobooth photos of the band:



Described in its Wikipedia article as a “German queer cinema horror film” by a Canadian director, Bruce La Bruce, Otto; or, Up with Dead People features a photostrip (and a photobooth flashback sequence) as a key moment in Otto’s journey.

A few weeks back, James Franco hosted “Saturday Night Live,” and starred in a sketch as a Christmas tree salesman who became overly attached to his trees. As he says goodbye to one, he gives “her” a photostrip of the two of them. No, it doesn’t make much sense.

Finally, we have a 2006 film starring Christina Ricci as a girl born with a pig’s snout, Penelope. Needless to say, she takes a strip of photos in a photobooth:

We say goodbye this week to a few Utah photobooth locations: two different contributors emailed this week letting us know that the veritable bonanza of Utah Kmarts with photochemical photobooths was too good to last. Booths at the Kmarts in Salt Lake City, West Jordan, and Draper are now gone. Thanks to Kylie and Steph for the updates.

We also say goodbye to our old hosting provider this week, and hello to a new one. Hopefully, our readers won’t see anything but a more responsive and reliable site; on our end, things are already miles better. 

One more new addition: the appetite for poorly-faked photostrips on TV seems unsated, and this week we bring you a pseudo-strip from an October, 2009 episode of Desperate Housewives (who knew that show was still on?).

We’ve been sitting on quite a few new photobooth items recently, just looking for a moment to post them. Now, with a little time this holiday weekend, we’re posting a few at a time. First, a brief faked photostrip in an episode of the original UK Life on Mars, in which Chris shows Sam some photos of him with his girlfriend, at the end of a tension-filled episode.



Next, we see an extended photobooth sequence from a 1951 flashback in an episode of Cold Case which originally aired last October. Thanks to Marco for letting us know about this one.

Another tip, this one from Klaas, led us to an episode from the first season of Burn Notice, from July, 2007. We’ve never seen someone slap another person in the face with a photostrip to jog their memory, but I guess it works…

Finally, we have (at least) the third appearance of a photostrip in the long history of The Simpsons, this one the first in high definition in the show’s 20th season (the other two are here and here). In this episode, both Marge and Homer and Moe and his girlfriend Maya take photostrips in the arcade photobooth, with varying results.

I was going to title this “Another reason America doesn’t need Jay Leno to stick around any longer,” or simply “Jay Leno is an idiot,” but I thought I’d try to be more charitable. We don’t usually cover much having to do with digital photobooths on the site, but this was too much to pass up. Jamie Lee Curtis was a guest on the Tonight Show last Friday night (starts at about 25:30), and ostensibly brought a photobooth with her to document the event. She asked Jay if they could take some photos together, and the booth, a digital machine labeled “Photo ID New Generation,” was wheeled out.



The first thing Leno says is “Oh, this is a real old-time one, isn’t it?” No Jay, it’s actually the exact opposite of a real old-time photobooth. Nevermind, though; he’s just using that line to set up the “joke” he’s about to unleash next: “You know how I can tell the old-time ones?” And then, pointing to the sample photos on the outside of the booth, he says, “They’re all white kids.” After he’s done laughing at his own joke, everyone’s favorite Jay Leno tick, he follows it with “See apparently, Hispanic and Black people didn’t have photographs back then.” 

It’s hard to know where to begin with this. First, hopefully Leno realizes he’s actually making the joke at the expense of the manufacturer of the modern-day booth, who doesn’t have the excuse that a manufacturer in the 1950s might have had to keep all of the people in the sample photos white. Secondly, it’s clear that “old-time” photobooths, in their heyday, provided a valuable opportunity for people of all races and socio-economic backgrounds to have a photo of themselves and their loved ones, without the expense of a camera or studio portrait. I realize no one is looking to Leno for historical accuracy or insightful observations about photography and society, but it needed pointing out. After the commercial, Curtis mentions that she’ll keep the photostrip as a “keepsake, forever and ever.” Too bad the digital print, which doesn’t look too good to begin with, will be faded by then. Maybe she should have brought in a real photoboooth.

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.

Thanks to some new-found success locating old TV shows and some helpful contributions from readers, we’ve been making steady progress adding to the growing body of photobooth knowledge and information over the past few weeks.

First, from our contributors, two western American photobooths we’ve long heard of but haven’t had the chance to visit: the great old booth at Arcade Amusements in Manitou Springs, Colorado, seen at right. It’s one of those booths that’s been at its location “forever,” and we’re glad it’s still working.

Second, we received a report and photos from a Model 20A at

Stellar Pizza, Ale, & Cocktails, located in Seattle, adding to that city’s impressive tally of photochemical photobooths.

In the world of TV, we’ve added a few obscure and international shows over the last few weeks, including two British shows: an episode of “Midsomer Murders” and one from the BBC’s “The Smoking Room,” seen here:



On the domestic front, we’ve finally been able to get images from two long-standing photobooths-on-TV rumors: first, we’ve got Scooby-Doo, Dick van Dyke, and a photobooth, as the gang visits a “Haunted Carnival” (what else?). And finally, we’ve watched it so you don’t have to: an episode of “Power Rangers in Space” which lifts the “superhero caught changing from mild-mannered alter ego in a photobooth” plotline from Superman III.

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.