It’s safe to say that for many of our younger readers, the 2001 film Amélie is one of the first things that comes to mind when they think of photobooths, or at least provides one of the strongest associations they have with photobooths, living as we do in a time that is somewhere on the downhill side of the “golden age” of the photochemical photobooth.

The thought that as the film was being released, photochemical photobooths had completely disappeared from Metro stations and street corners in Paris, seemed like a cruel irony indeed: the film captured a moment in time that no longer existed. But thanks to Ole, Dorothée, Eddy, and everyone else at Photoautomat, Paris is once again home to a black and white, photochemical photobooth.

The photobooth, located at the Palais de Tokyo along the Seine, has been in place since late 2007, and is now listed in our directory.

They’ve recently installed another photobooth in Paris, at the Point Ephemere, which we’ll list as soon as we get the photos.

Perhaps it’s time to start an “Outdoor Advertising” section here on Photobooth.net. More and more TV shows are using photobooth-themed ads on buildings, buses, and so on, including the Ellen Degeneres Show, advertised on the side of a Warner Bros. studio building in Burbank, California:

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. 

Photobooths have been popping up all over the place in the advertising world lately, and we’re doing our best to keep up with the trend. A few recent additions follow: first, a brief shot of some blown-up photostrips of Ellen Degeneres in a commercial for American Express.



Next, a promotion from Coppertone sun block featuring what they call the “DermaPhoto Booth,” a portable booth that takes a photo of your face that reveals hidden damage to your skin caused by the sun. The booth will be traveling around the country this summer, so you may have a chance to get your DermaPhoto taken and see the scary results.



Today, I caught an ad for E! Entertainment television featuring personalities from their upcoming shows at a carnival, taking part in various activities including posing in the photobooth:



And finally, CBS has been promoting its show “Two and a Half Men” with some ubiquitous bus banners on Metro buses all around Los Angeles; thanks to Aimee for catching this one with her camera:

As many of our readers already know, from the notices it has received in The New Yorker and the New York Times, and mentions on our site and around the web, the book American Photobooth by our friend and colleague Nakki Goranin has been published, after many years of collecting, research, and writing on Nakki’s part. Our copy arrived in the mail today, as did an email about some related events in New York City, both of which we’ll discuss here.

Nakki’s book is a part history, part photo gallery, a lavishly illustrated 220+ pages of photobooth goodness, and anyone interested in the fascinating journey of photobooths from a small town in Siberia to every arcade, boardwalk, and drugstore in America and beyond, should pick up a copy.

The first eighty pages or so detail the history of the booth, from Anatol Josepho’s Photomaton through the various technological iterations and important families who contributed to the evolution of the booth, all the way up to digital booths in the present day. The remainder of the book consists of photos from Nakki’s collection, a wide variety of single photos, photostrips, hand-colored pictures, photomatic frames, photos from every era and walk of life imaginable.

In addition to the aforementioned press, the book has also been featured in The Telegraph, Vermont Public Radio, and People Magazine, among other national and international media outlets. Visit the

Pine Street Art Works blog for more on the opening for the book, held there in February.

For our readers in the New York metro area, this Saturday, May 17th, brings a chance to hear Nakki discuss her book at the Jefferson Market Branch of the New York Public Library (Ave. of the Americas at 10th St.), and a related exhibition of photobooth photos from librarian, artist, and collector Billy Parrott will be on display in the lobby, and will be available through the end of May. We encourage our readers in the area to stop by and let us know how the talk and show go.

American Photobooth will be available for purchase at the talk, and is, of course, available from Amazon and everywhere books are sold, as they say.

Our hearty congratulations to Nakki on a great achievement, and a wonderful resource for photobooth enthusiasts to enjoy for years to come. We know how long you’ve been working on the book, and we’re happy to see it out in the world for all to enjoy.

Just an update to let folks know that through some nose-to-the-grindstone work on Tim’s part, we (think we) have solved the persistent and ongoing problem of spam comments in the Photobooth.net Discussion Board. Over the years, a lot of interesting questions and helpful answers have been posted on the board, but we’ve been subject to spam overload off and on, making it difficult to find the real messages amongst the chaff and noise. 

We’ve got some beefed-up anti-robot security in place now, and we think we’ve got the problem solved. We had to delete a few thousand spam accounts, so if you had registered but not posted, your account may have been deleted, for which we apologize. Most legitimate account-holders should have been spared, so head on over to browse around, ask questions, and offer up your answers and suggestions. Thanks.

We’ve got a few updates this week, from the four (or at least three) corners of the media world. First, from mainstream TV, an advertisement that proves you can use a photobooth to sell anything. The Venus Embrace razor is the product in this case, in an ad that encourages women to use the razor and “Reveal the Goddess in You.” In one of a half-dozen scenes in the commercial, two girls go into a pseudo-photobooth and giggle under the heading “Goddess of Friendship.”

From the world of art and photography, we bring a two-page feature and brief interview with us here at Photobooth.net in the internationally-distributed magazine ISM: A Community Project. The piece, called Photobooths: The Art of the Self Portrait. It’s a nice piece, and it’s a great magazine, available at select newsstands or on ISM’s site now; we encourage you to pick up a copy.

And finally, another old photo with with what must be a great story behind it. At the risk of starting up a “Photomatic of the Week” feature, I thought I’d post this eBay gem, because it’s a great photo and a little unusual.



Not only does this Photomatic feature the great “Souvenir of the Nation’s Capital” backing, but the young soldier in the photo is sitting behind a prop with the body of what looks like the cherubic new year of 1941 painted on it, which makes for a great image. Written on the photo itself and mostly faded at this point is the question “Guess Who?”, and on the reverse is written the date “January 13, 42.” This date doesn’t make much sense with the New Year 1941 image, but it’s still a great photo.

The history of the Photomatic will be the subject of another investigation at some point in the future, but I wanted to put up some images from some of the terrific Photomatic photos I’ve come across on eBay lately. These single-shot photobooths were found in railroad stations, nightclubs, and restaurants around the country, and many featured custom-designed backings that identified where the photo was taken.


This photo was taken at San Francisco’s Bal Tabarin nightclub, and instead of the traditional blanks on the back showing “Date” and “Place Taken,” this photo purports to show a member of the Bal Tabarin “Rogues Gallery,” and asks for “Date Entered” and “Behavior” to be filled in, though neither is on this particular photo. Some brief research turns up some information about Bal Tabarin, including this particularly helpful roundup of notes about the place. Check out this terrific amateur film from 1940 in the GLBT Historical Society collection for a brief glimpse of the exterior of this “Aristocrat of San Francisco Theater-Restaurants.” More Photomatics to come…

Another quick re-cap of photobooths in the news lately…

• I can’t seem to determine if the episode ever aired, as it’s not available on ABC.com or via any other less legal means, but a February taping of Extreme Makeover: Home Edition took place at the Hughes home in Louisville, Kentucky, and a black and white dip and dunk photobooth was installed in one of the boys’ rooms. A Louisville Courier-Journal article describes the home, and an accompanying video shows the booth as an integral part of the photo-centric bedroom.

• Also, thanks to Chris F. for pointing us to the new video from Million Dollar Strong, made up of Mike O’Connell and Yoshido, a.k.a. Ken Jeong, the doctor from Knocked Up. Check out the moments from the video featuring the Bar 107 photobooth in our Music Video section, or watch the video on YouTube.

• The blog at Modern Mechanix has featured two blasts from the photobooth past recently: first, an article about Anatol Josepho from 1928 titled “Penniless Inventor Gets Million for Photo Machine,” and second, a shorter piece about the invention of the Photomatic machine: “New Automatic Machine Delivers Metal-Framed Photos.” It’s great to see these hard-to-find magazine pieces archived, at least for now, on the web.

• And finally, thanks to Tim, each of our photobooth locations now features a nifty Google map right on the location page, to make your photobooth-hunting even easier.

Photobooth photos appear by the dozens on eBay every day, and sell for anywhere from 99¢ to $50, depending on their condition, subject matter, and provenance. After watching photobooth photo sales over the last few years, we’ve jumped in, tentatively, on a few occasions, and have found a few gems.

This miniature album, which is positively tiny (the photos are 1 1/2″ by 1 7/8″), has room for ten photos, and came to me with seven photos, all of the same young soldier, inside. I’ve never seen anything like it, with its transparent color cover and plastic ring binding. I’ll be posting some other eBay finds as they come.