Today we’ve got another in the sporadic series of photobooth-related nuggets we’ve come across on eBay. This set of seven photos, with one tantalizingly missing from the full complement of eight advertised on the envelope, show a striking young woman dressed in a fur collared coat and pearls. We see her smiling, unsmiling, looking to the right, looking to the left, and so on; what was in the final photo, and who ended up with it? Maybe she used it for a commutation ticket.

Just when you start to think you’re hearing more about photobooths disappearing than you are about new locations being discovered, a kind reader of our site will send in a massive update that makes you feel a little better about the whole situation. Courtesy of Meags Fitzgerald, we just received a big update, twelve photobooths in all, none of which have appeared on the site before. 

We’re adding them in installments, so the first to go up are the Canadian locations: nine booths in Alberta and one in Vancouver. The majority of the new booths are in Calgary, which just jumped from “unlisted” to somewhere in the top ten as far as active photochemical photobooth cities are concerned. We’ve always known that Canada is home to many active photobooths, but beyond a few in Toronto and BC, we haven’t had much documentation before now.

So here they are:

Edmonton City Centre 

Bonnie Doon Shopping Centre, Edmonton

Northland Village Mall I, Calgary

Northland Village Mall II, Calgary

North Hill Centre, Calgary

Eau Claire Market, Calgary

Deerfoot Mall, Calgary

Chinook Centre, Calgary

Calgary Greyhound Station

Antisocial Skate Shop, Vancouver

I don’t think we’ve ever seen a photobooth decked out like a bag of popcorn (at the Chinook Mall), but now that I see it, I can’t believe no one else seems to have thought of it before now. Very nice. Thanks to Meags for these locations, and we’ll have the rest of her contributions soon.

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.

We’ve posted the first of the backlog of submissions and new additions to the site since our hiatus; in the true spirit of summer, they’re locations at state fairgrounds and beachside boardwalks. 

Check out the black and white photobooths at the Minnesota State Fair in Minneapolis, as well as Jilly’s Arcade and Castaway Cove in Ocean City, New Jersey. Thanks to Tony for the Minnesota booth, and thanks to my friend Molly for doing what no other friend has, and following through on that promise: “Oh, you run a website about photobooths? Next time I see one, I’ll take a picture of it for you.“



Photo by Molly Wheeler

We seem to have taken a bit of an enforced summer vacation here at Photobooth.net, but thanks to some yeoman’s work from Tim, the three major functions of the site — the blog; the databases of locations, art, movies, and so on; and the discussion board — all seem to be back up and running. The discussion board is functioning again, though we’re still working on getting it looking sharp again. We’ll be rolling out a bunch of new locations, films, artists, and so on over the next few days, the backlog from a few months of no postings. Thanks again for your patience.

We apologize that the site has been somewhat dormant these past few weeks. Our webhost performed a migration, and once the dust settled, pretty much everything on our site was broken. Brian and I have been working hard trying to get things back in shape, and as of right now, the blog and its inner-workings seem to be alive again.

The only remaining issue we know of (please let us know if you find anything else that is broken) is the discussion board. When we created this site, we went with a discussion system that soon thereafter went dormant. Basically, we bet on the wrong horse. We are now trying to figure out if it makes sense to spend energy getting it back up and running, or if we should try to migrate the discussion history to a new, more up-to-date discussion board. Your opinions are appreciated.

We’ll keep you posted.

Sorry, you already missed the opening, but Tim Sullivan’s show (You Feel Me?) is on display at San Francisco’s Steven Wolf Fine Arts through June 20. The show includes at least one photobooth piece, in which the artist reenacts various moments from the 1955 James Dean film Rebel Without a Cause by way of facial expressions. From the press release:

Sullivan starts with a movie performance such as James Dean’s in Rebel Without a Cause, then breaks it down into its sequential emotional moments–anger, happiness, resentment, whatever. He then reenacts those emotions one at a time inside a photo booth until he has captured the entire performance in a series of self-portraits. These end up as long, elegant strips, crisp, analytical grids and thick, monotonous flip books, representing both Sullivan’s performance and the original–the presence and the absence in this work. 

If you happen to visit the show, send us a report.

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.

Taking a look at their website, it seems Photo-Me is now Foto-Mat. Outside the U.S., Photo-Me is still Photo-Me, and it looks like the branding transition is still in progress, as the name “Photo-Me” still pops up throughout Foto-Mat’s website. Thanks to Anthony for the tip.

While it’s 99% tedious photos of ‘tweens mugging for the camera in an Apple Store, our RSS feed for Flickr photos tagged with the word ‘photobooth’ still manages to turn up some interesting pictures every once in awhile. Last week, I spotted what looked like a photobooth photo blown up to cover the side of a building, and in contacting the artist, I was happy to find out more about the project, and others like it that he’s been working on over the years.



Pierre Fraenkel’s work often involves the public presentation of found photos, blown up to varying degrees of massiveness. As he describes his latest project, “Unknown little boy,”

I made a collage of an unknown little boy’s ID photograph. In my collages, I very often like showing people I meet, but above all, I like showing unknown people — either old photographs from a flea market or an antique shop, or an ID photograph found on the ground.

I’m fond of the slightly strained and forced smile of the kid. And then, there’s this hand — whose hand is it? His mother’s? From his clothes and his haircut as well as the quality of the photo, I would say the photograph was taken at the end of the 70s.

The project was done for the 2009 KKO Festival in Altkirch, France, and since we first saw the photo, the boy has now been joined by an unknown girl, as well. We’ve got some more info in our Projects section, and much more can be found on Pierre’s website.

UPDATE: For the Francophones among our readers, a local TV news interview story about the project.