Behind the curtain

Photo Boother — Mon, 14 Feb 2011 09:42:09 +0000

Behind the curtain, an instant classic
By Alan Berner

Fifth in an occasional series

They mug, they smooch, they frown and they cavort inside it.

They act out and produce just about anything except that “American Gothic” look.

In the squeezed, semiprivate space of the photo booth, the only landscape is the face.

Three minutes later, the reward pops out. It’s a 7 Â¾-inch-long strip of four images from the machine, considered the first invention to offer instant photography.

Russian immigrant Anatol Josepho, known for his impatience, developed the photo booth in 1925, two decades before the Polaroid. Soon, block-long lines formed near New York’s Times Square, with people eager to drop a quarter in the machine and have a strip of images emerge a couple of minutes later.

The booths used to populate the corners of five-and-dimes, groceries, bars and fairs but now are hard to find.

Seattle Art Museum has one that’s part of its current Andy Warhol exhibit. Warhol considered the images to be small works of art from “little curtained theaters.”

Budd Mishkin, from South Orange, N.J., recently swiped his credit card at the SAM booth. (It no longer accepts cash.) But he failed to get seated alongside his wife, Peri Smilow, in time for the first flash.

“Great. You and my arm. It’s very Warholesque.”

The photo booth will be at SAM through Sept. 6, and by then about 7,000 will have exposed their personalities and left a frame on the exhibit wall.

“There’s nothing in the world like a photobooth.”

Photo Boother — Thu, 10 Feb 2011 10:39:57 +0000

Even amid the worldwide depression of the 1930s, the photobooth continued to grow. Entrepreneurs who couldn’t afford to buy the real thing built their own versions, some out of wood, then hid a photographer in the back who shot and developed the pictures and slipped them through a slot. The unsuspecting subjects were none the wiser.
By mid-century, photobooths were ubiquitous. Jack and Jackie Kennedy stepped into one in the 1950s. Yoko Ono and John Lennon included a reproduction strip with their 1969 recording, “Wedding Album.” In the 1960s, Andy Warhol shuttled models with rolls of quarters from booth to booth in New York City. A 1965 Time magazine cover features Warhol’s photobooth portraits of “Today’s Teen-Agers.”
These days digital photobooths, which became available in the 1990s, let users add novelty messages and backgrounds and delete and retake shots. Allen Weisberg, president of Apple Industries, which has manufactured digital booths since 2001, says digital photobooth sales continue to grow. “Photobooths have made a tremendous resurgence,” he says. “It’s like apple pie and baseball. It’s part of our heritage.” The digital booths are being used in new ways. Lately, a number of companies have popped up offering rentals of lightweight, portable photobooths for use at weddings and parties.
But Goranin and other purists long for the real McCoy with its distinctive smell, clanking machinery and the fraught anticipation that comes with waiting for the photos to appear. A Web site, Photobooth.net, documents the locations of a dwindling number of these mechanical dinosaurs.
“The old chemistry booths, which I love, are becoming harder and harder to find,” says Goranin. “But the [digital] booth is still a fun experience. You still get great photos. You still have a wonderful time in them. You still have the old-fashioned curtains that you can draw and that sense of mystery.” Goranin smiles. “There’s nothing in the world like a photobooth.”
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Behind the curtain

“There’s nothing in the world like a photobooth.”