Your 2009 International Photobooth Convention organizers are hard at work preparing for the event from their respective corners of the country as the big day gets ever closer. We’re now just one month away from the opening night, April 3, at Center Portion in Chicago. 

We’ve had a lot of interest via email and through our Facebook group, and would encourage all photobooth artists, collectors, and experimenters out there to contribute to the event, whether or not you can attend. As part of the convention, we’ll be curating a group show of art created in and inspired by the photobooth as well as collections of vernacular or found photobooth photos. Check out the Call for Entries (PDF) if you’re interested in submitting a piece or collection for the show. 

As we’re gearing up for the 2009 International Photobooth Convention and a revamped “Photobooths in Cinema” lecture, I’ve added three major examples of photobooths on film from three important European directors. First, a story of a Frenchman in L.A. directed by Jacques Deray, The Outside Man.



Jean-Louis Trintignant joins a cast including Roy Scheider, Ann-Margret, and Angie Dickinson in this story about a hitman who finds himself becoming a target.

Second, thanks to a tip from Klaas Dierks, Wim Wenders’ breakout 1974 film Alice in the Cities.



Rüdiger Vogler plays a writer and photographer who finds himself in charge of a young girl as they try to find her grandmother, somewhere in Germany.

And finally, thanks to an image featured in Federica Muzzarelli’s book Formato tessera, a 1989 film by director Ettore Scola, Che ora è, starring Marcello Mastroianni and Massimo Troisi.



These two giants of Italian cinema play a reunited father and son who talk through their relationship over the course of the film. We’re happy to have these titles added to our list, and are always looking for more, so if you know of something we haven’t listed yet, please let us know.

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.

In the midst of planning for this year’s Photobooth Convention this week, we received a great email, of the sort that reminds us why we started this site four years ago. It’s about the booths, sure, but it’s also about the people who love them, who keep them alive, bring them back from the dead, and make them available for people to enjoy, all over the world. 

The email came from Martin and Ira in Moscow, the two photobooth enthusiasts behind Schnellfoto.ru (also listed in our Projects section).



Along with photos of a photobooth and a scan of a photostrip, they sent the detailed story of how the photobooth came to be, and it’s quite a story.

One of us (Ira) is a photographer from Moscow, the other one (Martin) a german journalist, living in Moscow for more than ten years. Ira got enthusiastic for classical photobooths when we visited Geneva some years ago (the swiss booths were still running at this time). About a year ago we started looking for a machine ourselves. We phoned around all over europe, but it showed out that nearly all booth operators had already switched to digital, and, horrible as it is, thrown away and destroyed the older machines.

After a phase of disenchantment, we did some more desperate calls in Moscow, and it showed out that one — the last — M‑22 had escaped the massacre by miracle, and was standing in the rain in the courtyard of a former soviet ball-bearing plant — some 2000 meters from our own house. We acquired it for a modest amount of money. Inside was a mayhem: flash generator and capacitors were stolen, as well as nearly all plugs, switches and other somehow vendible equipment, most of the cable harnesses were dumbly cut through. The mechanics (transmission, spider, paper transport, even camera) though were intact. Then followed three months of work in the evenings in a rusty soviet garage. We got a flash from an operator in europe, rebuilt all the rest ourselves, including wiring, money accepting system, outside decoration etc. etc.

The booth made its debut last summer for one day on the so-called “picnic Afisha” — the biggest summer festival in Moscow, with a huge success. Now, at the new location, we plan to stage different events with the machine — a portrait festival, a contest for the best strip, and Ira is going to use it in her work as a photographer.

You can find the location of the booth (at the Winzavod Contemporary Art Center in a former wine factory) on a Google map on the booth’s page in our Directory, but I’ll also include it here, in Russian, just because it looks wonderful:

ВИНЗАВОД — Центр современного искусства

4‑й Сыромятнический переулок, дом 1, стр. 6 

Москва

Россия

Their site is worth looking around (even if you can’t read Russian) for the photos of the booth in action and for the video of a Russian TV feature on the booth that includes a part on Anatol Josepho, the Russian father of the photobooth, as well as Martin and Ira in their booth.

We’re very pleased to have this new addition to our directory, and even more pleased to have made another far-flung connection with kindred spirits in the global photobooth community.

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!

We’ve finally made the leap to the latest version of Movable Type after making do with a version from two years ago for far too long. Let us know if you see anything odd as we try to make sure everything is still working as it should.

It’s been a little quiet here on the blog as we’ve been hard at work behind the scenes preparing for some changes and events in 2009. Check back on Monday for an announcement about what we’ve been planning, and if you’re a photobooth enthusiast, block off some time in early April. It’s been awhile since our last International Photobooth Convention, hasn’t it?

Happy to find a photobooth-related event in Southern California, I ventured to the Santa Monica Airport this afternoon, armed with a stack of Photobooth.net postcards, to attend the second annual Vernacular Photography Fair, which we noted here a few days ago. The event, held in a gallery space at the Santa Monica Art Studios, consisted of ten dealers from around the country who specialize in “found photography, anonymous imagery or snapshot photography,” as well as hundreds of photography enthusiasts browsing, buying, and talking photos.

I was happy to make the acquaintance of Babbette Hines, whose book Photobooth was one of the inspirations that helped launch this site more than four years ago. We had a nice conversation about the joys of photobooth photos, and commiserated about the recent upswing in prices that have made collecting them less affordable than it used to be.

I also enjoyed meeting a number of other folks, including dealers Myles Haselhorst of Ampersand Vintage in Portland, Leonard Lightfoot of Vernacular Visions, John Nichols of the Santa Paula Snapshot Museum, as well as the folks who put together the event. I’m hoping Photobooth.net can be more involved next time; I could see a lot of interesting ways to collaborate. Two years after moving here, it’s great to finally get a little more involved in the vintage photography scene. Thanks to everyone at D3 Projects for putting this together.

We’ve posted images from the 1929 Harold Lloyd comedy Welcome Danger, which, along with Lonesome (noted here last month), is one of the earliest films we’ve found yet that features a photobooth. In Welcome Danger, the machine is more of an automatic photo machine without the booth, but the principle is the same, and once again, the photo taken by the machine plays an integral part in the plot of the film.



When a photo taken by Billie (Barbara Kent, who also played Mary in Lonesome) fails to come out of the machine, she walks away. A moment later, Harold (Harold Lloyd) approaches the machine, sits for his photo, and once it has arrived, places it on the drying stand for a moment. After replacing his hat, he looks at the photo and finds that it is a sort of movie fantasy double exposure, with his and Billie’s images neatly superimposed next to one another. He becomes smitten with the girl in his photo, and, as the stills from the film show, he eventually tracks her down.



We now have films featuring photobooths from every decade of the photobooth’s history, the 1920s to the present, missing only one: the 1930s. I’m hoping some eagle-eyed fans of ’30s musicals are keeping their eyes peeled for photobooth appearances. if you spot something please let us know.

This weekend in Santa Monica, California, D3Projects, in conjunction with a variety of dealers, artists, and other groups, is presenting their second annual Vernacular Photography Fair, an event which should be of interest to all photobooth fans in Southern California.

In the press release on their website, D3 describe the event as “Two days of vernacular photography, featuring top dealers nationwide — photos & books for sale.”

Vernacular photography — also known as found photography, anonymous imagery or snapshot photography — is a genre of photography making its way into the spotlight of fine art. Artists, collectors and dealers rediscover photographs estranged from their owners and lost in time at flea markets, estate and yard sales, attics and even in abandoned boxes on the street. The new owners of these photographs give them a new life and relevance in the world today.

Found photographs, anonymous images and snapshots from the 20s until the late 70s will be offered for show and for sale to the public by the following art dealers: Jane Handel, Leonard Lightfoot, Ray Hetrick, Babbette Hines, Diane Meyer, Carl Mautz, John Nichols, Desiree Dreeuws, Ron Slattery and Myles Haselhorst.

We’ll be attending and look forward to meeting other photobooth and found photo enthusiasts. We’ll have a report on the event next week.