Another update of photobooth news from around the world of the arts, from music to museums to found photos, plus a few cases of run-ins with the law:

• Beck’s new album The Information features a lyric about photobooths, as reported in a recent review:

Take a little picture in a photobooth/
Keep it in a locket and I think of you/
Both of our pictures, face to face/
Take off your necklace and throw it away

• The Melbourne Photobooth Project at the 2006 Melbourne Fringe Festival gets a review in The Age.

• In the UK, artist Gillian Wearing’s work is profiled in The Guardian:

In 2003, Wearing exhibited five eerie photos of members of her family. We seemed to be looking at snapshots of the artist’s mother and father; a professional headshot of her smiling uncle; a snapshot of her shirtless brother in his bedroom brushing elbow-length hair; and a photo-booth picture of the artist herself at 17.

• Across the Channel in France, photobooth (or should we say photomaton) photos are featured at the Centre Pompidou. Thanks to Pat for the tip on these anonymous 1929 photos. Check out this solo photo and this strip as well. (If these links don’t work, search for ‘photomaton’ on the site).

• Something we haven’t noted before, a wonderful collection of found photos, more than 200 in all, at SquareAmerica.com, “a gallery of vintage snapshots & vernacular photography.” 

• On a different note, we have news of more lewdness in the photobooth on the boardwalk in Seaside Heights, New Jersey.

• And finally, the story of a rejected passport application based on the photobooth photo the girl’s family provided. 

A five-year-old girl’s passport application was rejected because her photograph showed her bare shoulders. Hannah Edwards’s mother, Jane, was told that the exposed skin might be considered offensive in a Muslim country. The photograph was taken at a photo-booth at a local post office for a family trip to the south of France.

Photo: Photomaton, Anonymous 1929. Centre Pompidou

In an article about a digital photobooth that projected photos of attendees on the wall at a Whitney Museum benefit last week, Moby voiced his support of real, honest-to-goodness old-style photobooths. When asked if he took part, he replied,

“No, I didn’t do that,” he said. “There was a long line for it. And I used to go to the photo booth machine…there’s an arcade on Mott Street, way down in Chinatown, that has this great photo booth machine and, it seems, this is nice but sort of a pale imitation to the real thing. I’m sort of a purist, I think.”

Glad to hear we’ve got another ally in the fight to keep dip-and-dunk photobooths alive.

A recent project based in the UK documents the unheralded members of the punk generation, thirty years on, through photobooth pictures. The project, called 100 Punks, draws parallels between photobooths and punk:

Never more so was this the case, than with the punk generation. Like punk, the machines were cheap, instant and easy to operate, once inside, there were no rules, perhaps the only time the subject could be in total control of the image they portrayed to the rest of the world. Each hair colour caught, new relationship captured. Self-concious, self portraits of the not so blank generation.

Check out the project online and in various galleries and museums in the coming year.

First, a piece in the ‘Currents’ section of the Wilmington, North Carolina Star-News asks Where’s the downtown photo booth? The article seems to be a series of small commentaries, but the layout is such that the headline for each section looks like the rest of the body text, so it’s a little hard to read, but among headlines like “What’s worse? Being drunk in public? Or snapping photos of it?” and “Audience Nonparticipation,” about the fact that people haven’t been participating in this particular newspaper column, the author wonders about the lack of photobooths in town:

When I first moved to Wilmington and tried out different downtown bars, I wondered: Where’s the downtown bar photo booth? When I lived in Orlando several years ago, there were quite a few of those classic photo booths in downtown bars, and a constant slew of hipsters wearing scarves in July bucked up to them. I had several friends who had multiple stacks of photo strips at home. I’m talking in the hundreds. They’re like documents, proof, evidence of good time and bad. Plus, it’s fun to make faces and think you’re cool. So, where’s the local booth? I can’t think of a single bar where a photo booth wouldn’t do gangbusters business. It’s something the $1 PBR and $10 martini crowds could really get behind. Somebody needs to get on this.

Next, a poll by Creative Bulletin lists the Hamlet cigar ad featuring “Baldy Man” in a photobooth as the fourth best (British) TV ad of all time. 

Finally, Gridskipper brings us a review of the Daddy Long Legs Hotel in Cape Town, South Africa, whose thirteen rooms are each individually decorated by an artist. One of the rooms, called the Photo Booth, features the work of artist Antony Smyth, who took photos of Cape Town residents with his camera and white backdrop, and used 3,240 images on raised blocks to cover the walls. So while the photos aren’t true photobooth images, this room is a definite must-visit photobooth location.

In between road trips this summer, each of which netted one solitary photobooth sighting (here and

here), I spent a brief afternoon traversing Massachusetts’ North Shore in search of a few remaining locations I hadn’t had the chance to visit in my five years living there. Now that things have settled down in L.A., I’ve had a chance to get the locations on the site.

First, I headed to Salisbury Beach, and to Joe’s Playland. Each of the two locations across the street from one another had a working booth, both black and white. The first was fairly normal, but the second was notable for its wider paper and three shots-per-strip setup, similar to the booth at Playland Arcade in Hampton Beach, New Hampshire.

Around the corner from Joe’s, I wandered into Carefree Amusement, which was fairly deserted, but did feature a nice black and white booth. I had trouble getting it to produce a strip, but the woman in charge gave me her key to open it up, check it out, and try it again. Thanks!

I headed next to Salem, and to Salem Willows Park, home of the Salem Willows Arcade. I found two booths next to one another, one black and white and one color. It was nice to see that at the height of summer, all five booths I found were working, turning out great looking photos.

We’ve now got 18 locations for the state of Massachusetts, three of which were short-term at museums and the like; that leaves 15 photobooths around the state. I know I’ve missed a few at some metro-area malls, but I’d love to know if there any that have missed our attention in bars, restaurants, and arcades around the state.

When I read the title of this article, “£100K Fine for Burns Photo Firm,” I expected the piece to be about a photobooth company named “Burns Photo, Inc.,” or something along those lines. But then I realized that I was reading the article on the website of a British newspaper, hence the uniquely constructed headline, and that there aren’t that many photobooth companies dealing with chemicals these days.

Sure enough, Photo-Me International was fined for forcing workers to “mix toxic chemicals by hand that left them covered in weeping sores. The chemicals were so powerful that workers’ eyelids dried out and cracked, and one man’s fingers were burned so badly he couldn’t do up his shirt buttons without the blistered tips bursting.”

It’s well-known that photobooth chemicals are toxic; it seems inconceivable that Photo-Me wouldn’t give their employees the necessary protection and precautions. They should know better.

When you’re finished with that article, read more pieces with similarly phrased titles like “Honours Cops Quiz Blair Chiefs” and “Sex Cheat Husband Killed Wife.”

Two notable items from the world of eBay this week: first, a framed set of two photos purported to be of a young (18 year-old) James Dean. The photos, dated 1949, feature a Photomat label from the Terminal Arcade in Indianapolis, Indiana, and are described as follows:

In one shot he’s posing serenely, wearing the eyeglasses he needed to combat his extreme myopia, and in the other he is laughing uproariously sans glasses. The pictures measure 2.5″ x 3″ and are in metal frames, as was often the case with booth photos at the time, and are in Fine condition with a little staining and tarnish. From the James Dean Museum archive.

The auction is listed through eBay Live Auctions, and has an estimate between $640 and $960. The current bid is at $160. If you’re a potential bidder, be warned that the bid carries a 22.5% buyer’s premium as well.

Also in progress is an auction for a set of clippings out of a gallery catalog of photostrips of Edie Sedgwick, part of Andy Warhol’s Factory crew and subject of an upcoming film. The auction includes fourteen strips totalling 56 different photos of Edie. We’ll keep our eyes on both of these interesting items.

Photobooth.net’s own resident expert Tim is the author of a recent piece featured on TeachingPhoto, “a newsletter for photography and imaging educators.” The article, titled “The Photobooth: Timeless Self-Portrait Vending Machine,” is a concise history of the photobooth, a survey of artists who use photobooth photos in their work, and an analysis of the state of the traditional photobooth today. Tim has filled the piece with links to nearly every person, company, and event he mentions, and the article will serve as a great quick reference guide for new initiates into the world of the photobooth. The article is also archived on Photobooth.net.

Paul Hudson, owner of Lawrence Photo in Lawrence, Kansas, has created a “replica of a curtained photo booth” with a live photographer and the results printed on a postcard, as part of an event called “The Photo Booth Project,” open to the public until September 23. In an article in the Wichita Eagle, Douglas recalls his first time in the booth, saying “I have a strip from a photo booth in El Paso, Texas, when I was about a year old.”

The event opened with a packed reception last month, and has proven to be a popular attraction. As reporter Chris Shull writes, 

The photo booth is as American as hot rods and parking lot carnivals. Those closet-sized boxes coax giggling kids and proud parents into a cramped, curtained-off compartment, where a camera captures silly faces and stolen kisses and then dispenses memories in strips of ID-sized photos.

The booth is open during store hours until September 23, and we encourage any Lawrence-area Photobooth.net readers to check it out and send us a report and some photos.

In a review of downtown LA’s Bar 107, which is next on our to-do list for its photobooth, Gridskipper mention’s the bar’s booth, and then goes on to define the photobooth in general as “the best frat boy excuse for breaking the touch barrier since five billion decibel music.” The photobooth is all things to all people, indeed. We’ll visit soon, take in the “ironic hipster chic one might think lacking on the left coast: red walls, ginormous NSFW Bible art, stuffed deer heads, random signs, etc.,” and report back.