Every time we discover a new photobooth, another one seems to disappear. Sometimes this happens to the same booth, and today we present listings for two photobooths in the Los Angeles area that came and went before we even had a chance to notice. Ricky visited photobooths at a salon called Lucas Echo Park and at a nearby Rite Aid pharmacy in December; by the time I visited in March, they were both gone. Another one of Ricky’s submissions, the photobooth at Café 50s in Sherman Oaks, has also gone away, replaced by a digital booth. 

While we’re happy to be an up-to-date guide for people looking for photobooths to visit as they travel the country, we also think it’s important to keep track of those dip and dunk photobooths that are no longer with us, or no longer where they once were. As we move into our third year of operation and get closer to a whopping 200 photobooths in our directory, look for some changes to the way we present our listings, making them easier to search and browse, and making it easier to tell which booths are still actually up and running. 

Thanks to the time and generosity of a photobooth enthusiast in Germany, our international photobooth listings have grown by five booths. As we near 200 photobooths in our list, we’re happy to have five fantastic-looking outdoor photobooths from Berlin in the database. Klaas first submitted the Rosenthalerplatz photobooth back in 2006, and this week, has passed on five more locations, all black and white booths that live outdoors and are accessible year-round, 24 hours a day. The photobooths are found on Zossenerstrasse, Warschauerstrasse, Marienburger Strasse, and at the S‑Bahn Rathaus Steglitz rail station (plus one more on the way).

Update: S‑Bahn Treptower Park has been added, bringing the total for Berlin to six booths.

Klaas’s photos are particularly evocative: check out the full version here and below the fold.

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From the world of British tv, we have a story about hypnotism, photobooths, and international air travel. Richard Critchlow, a 21 year-old student, was hypnotized in Wolverhampton London, England by Derren Brown. As this Sky News story explains, Critchlow woke up 13 hours later in an identical photobooth in Marrakech’s Djema al Fna market, more than 1400 miles away in Morocco.

Richard, 21, found himself in a chaotic Marrakech market after sleeping through a 13-hour trip. He stumbled out of a photo booth in the North African state after being hypnotised in an identical one in England. Brown told the Daily Mirror: “He was in a deep sleep. He had no sense of any time passing at all. His profound bewilderment eventually gave way to huge delight.” After being hypnotised, Mr Critchlow from Wolverhampton was whisked off to Heathrow Airport. The student was slumped in a wheelchair as he was put on a plane, flown to Morocco then wheeled through passport control.

I guess I should have stayed in Las Vegas another week: thanks to a comment on a previous post, we’ve seen flurry of black and white photobooth pictures of NBA All-Stars in Las Vegas for the game this past weekend.

The photobooth was at the Palms Casino, for an “All Star Media Availability” event on February 16, and the photos showcase the goofy grins of Shaquille O’Neal, Kobe Bryant, Steve Nash, LeBron James, and other familiar faces. Thanks to Amy for the original comment, which led us to Kevin Garnett, and then to a few Google Alerts that led us to the other photostrips around the web. You can check out seven photostrips here and four others here (with some duplicates).

The photos, as seen on Yahoo! Sports, are credited as “by Jennifer Pottheiser,” (see more of her NBA photos here) which brings up the age-old conundrum of how to credit a photobooth photo. The subject is usually the one who initiates the photographic action by inserting money or pressing a button, but when you get down to it, a machine is taking the photo, and we can credit the subject who pressed the button, the person overseeing the booth, or the whoever grabs the photo out of the slot and scans it.

Photo: Shaquille O’Neal, by Jennifer Pottheiser/NBAE via Getty Images on Yahoo! Sport.

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.

We spent the past weekend in Las Vegas, and I hoped to find a couple of photobooths, ready for enthusiastic partygoers to document their weekends of debauchery. I should have known that in a place so heavily trafficked and constantly upgraded as Las Vegas, most of the booths would be digital. At the arcade at New York New York, the photobooth was digital, as it was at the arcade at MGM, and from examples I’ve seen on the web, the photobooths at Stratosphere and the Rainforest Cafe are both digital, as well. A photobooth in front of the Imperial Palace casino closed last year, and was probably digital anyway. So, I was pleased to find a Flickr photo of a photostrip from a real dip and dunk chemical photobooth in Las Vegas.

On Saturday afternoon, I paid a visit to this photobooth, at the Golden Palm Hotel. From the MGM Grand, where we were staying, I took off along Tropicana Boulevard toward the Golden Palm, about a mile away. I expected a brief stroll, but it was more like a hike, over two giant pedestrian bridges, through the parking lot of the Excalibur, over Interstate 15, and around the chainlink fence and into the Golden Palm’s parking lot. Crossing I‑15 from the Strip is like entering another world, and the hotel was pretty dead. It used to be the Golden Palm Casino and Hotel, but it seems to be the Golden Palm Hotel and Lounge now, with the “Casino” unceremoniously painted over on their sign. The photobooth was indeed a real Photo-Me booth, but it was in the lounge, and the lounge didn’t open for another four hours. So, I was stuck snapping a photo through a locked exterior door, and I hope an intrepid Las Vegas photobooth enthusiast will send us a scan of a photo from this booth at some point in the future. I also hope I’m not right, and that there are a few more old-style photobooths still around in Las Vegas.

Corel Software, the fine folks who brought you Word Perfect (or at least bought it and revived it) are currently promoting what they call the Corel Snapfire Plus Photo Booth Contest, in which they will be “compiling the world’s biggest photo booth photo strip” through user-submitted snapshots. I hate to be so critical when they’re obviously trying to rustle up interest in their product by tapping into whatever warm feelings people have for the photobooth, but they do such a poor job that we have to point some things out. First, of course, it’s a photobooth-style strip, but it’s sort of strange to say they’re compiling the world’s largest photostrip, when it’s really just an assemblage of digital photos that people send in. Are they really even going to print them in a long strip?

In their statement, they say, “Yes, we want those one-armed self portraits that everyone has taken of themselves at some point. ” So it’s not even really supposed to be in the style of a photobooth shot, but rather in the just-as-recognizable but much newer digital camera self-portrait style, slightly off-kilter but charming.

We want you to send us your photo, and we’ll add it to (what we hope will be) the world’s longest photo booth photo strip!

Are there other photostrips out there that are longer than the traditional strip, like, say, nine or ten inches long? Are they worried they might not make it?

Contest details: Submit your photo showing love, ready to be added to a long line of photographs (just like a good old fashioned photos booth) [sic]. It’s easy!

And the final instruction of the contest:

Visit snapfire.com on February 14th to see yourself as part of the World’s Biggest Photo Booth!

Wait a minute. Are we trying to make the world’s longest strip or the world’s biggest photobooth? Those are two really different things.

And finally,

That’s all there is to it! Keep an eye on Snapfire.com on Valentine’s Day to see you’re [sic] picture as part of the world’s biggest photo booth.

Hmm. We’ll keep our eyes peeled to see what the final photostrip — or photobooth — looks like.

A press release from Skidmore College announces an upcoming photography exhibition from Joachim Schmid, whose “Photoworks” show includes all variety of photographs, including forgotten photobooth photos. The show will be presented at the Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery, and will run through April 9, 2007. 

As an artist who works in the medium of found photography, Joachim Schmid salvages photos from flea markets and archives, cuts them out of catalogues and publications, retrieves them from city streets, and finds them on the Internet. He then assembles series of photos as artworks that explore the emotional power and recurrent eccentricities of everyday photography. 

The 111 images randomly excerpted for the Tang exhibition include family snapshots, ID photos, and photo-booth discards that Schmid picked up over the past 25 years on walks through cities around the world. Many images are creased, tire-tracked, torn up, walked on, rain-soaked, and/or sun-faded. 

Photo-Me, the international company responsible for photochemical and digital photobooths around the world, has hired Lazard as financial advisors to help them deal with a potential break-up of the company into three separate sectors.

The appointment of Lazard, which will work alongside JPMorgan Cazenove, the group’s existing financial adviser and joint broker, marks the start of a strategic review that could lead to a sale of one or all of the three businesses, Photo-Me said.

As we noted last month, Photo-Me has been considering splitting up its three sectors — vending, minilab manufacturing and wholesale manufacturing — and selling off one or more of them. In light of changes in the photography industry as well as the approach of biometric passports, Photo-Me has seen rough financial times over the last year or so.

Phoeniz Arizona’s Trunk Space, home to a photobooth we’ve long had on our “To Visit” list, is having, as we speak, a sort of going away party for their photobooth technician, Mike.

More about Mike: He has worked at this job for 21 years! In the past 2 months he has lost all his profitable photobooths (the ones at Spectrum got robbed twice) and the other mall went digital. He has kept our photobooth from getting removed (due to poor sales) more than once. 

The gallery, whose booth was voted best photobooth in Phoenix, is home to “Experimental Theater, Performance, Music, Puppets, Weird Stuff, Circus Side Show Acts, Fine Art, Handmade Gifts, & Espresso drinks, as well as being a meeting place for artists, curious people and weary travelers.”

We’ve seen a lot of photos from the booth on Flickr and LiveJournal, but we’d really love an official contribution to our Locator in the form of a photo of the booth itself and a nice high-quality scan of a photostrip. It would double our count of Arizona photobooths, and we’d love to have the ‘Space represented.