TransformOnline’s Daily Blog chose the Photobooth Directory, whose days are numbered at Doubleperf.com now that Photobooth.net is getting its sea legs, as a pick of the day in their Culture section. Add that to the star turn on NYC cable in December and the slew of recent photobooth contributions I’ve received from New York, North Carolina, and Seattle in the last two months, and I’d call it the beginnings of something. We’re not at critical mass yet, but hey, people are paying attention, and more people will pay even more attention with a legit domain name, courtesy of Tim. Now, if I can just remember to keep using “photobooth” instead of “photo booth,” I think I’ll be all set.
If you find yourself in Edinburgh in the next few months, head over to the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art for the
Andy Warhol Self-Portraits exhibition, which opened this week. A review of the show in the Herald gives an overview of the pieces in the exhibit, which include Warhol’s famous photobooth self-portraits.
…[I]t is when he comes into contact with a real machine — the photobooth — that his self-portraits truly take off. The photobooth was Warhol’s studio as much as the Factory. In 1963 he made his first key series of silkscreens on canvas using photobooth pictures as a source. Warhol comes across like some composite portrait of an unholy triumvirate of criminal, celebrity and saint, dressed in overcoat, sunglasses, shirt and tie. Mugshot, publicity shot or studied portrait? The images are all three.
The exhibition closes May 2.
Another article on the exhibition, from Scotland on Sunday, mentions Warhol’s “early works and the original photo-booth snapshots on which they were based.”
Inspired by conceptual artist Pierre Bismuth’s nomination, alongside Charlie Kaufman and Michel Gondry, for an Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay for their work on Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Artforum Magazine this week took a brief look at “Conceptual Art at the Oscars.”
While Bismuth’s work behind the scenes of the film has received recognition, the article points out that is has not always been so. Der Fotomatonreparateur (The photobooth repairman) by German art collective Die Tödliche Doris, is given as an example of an instance in which conceptual art has likely inspired a film (in this case, Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s Amélie), but has not been recognized.
Der Fotomatonreparateur…which was first shown at the 1982 Paris Biennial, includes a collection of torn-up photographs made by a repairman who abandons his test images–a central storyline in Amélie.
See the Photobooths in Movies and TV entries for Eternal Sunshine and Amélie. Also check out more examples of photobooths in art.
A Sunday New York Times article titled “A Night Out With: The Kills: The Power of 2” details the the band’s night in New York. As the article states, “At 7B, they crowded into a photo booth. Poses were struck, pictures were taken and drinks were ordered. The booth spit out a strip of stylish black-and-white portraits that looked as if they had been snapped in 1967.”
See the directory profile for the 7B photobooth.
The Photobooth.net Photobooth Blog is officially launched today. The goal of the blog is to bring to light examples of photobooths in the news, on television, and in film, as well as to highlight art projects and other works on the internet and around the world that employ photobooths. Finally, the blog will be a forum for announcements about Photobooth.net itself, including new features, interesting developments, and other milestones. It will be administered by Tim and Brians, with other contributors added down the line. Welcome!
