Photobooth

« Two geeks, two photobooths, 8 frames. Both booths seemed to experience technical problems with the developer but still it was goofy, random fun. »

Self-portraits have always seemed terribly narcissistic and vain to me and I especially hated the years of school yearbook photos we were forced to have taken since they were always awful. The man who 'invented' the concept of individual annual school portraits died this week and I thought a fitting burial would be to fill his grave with millions of the photos he cursed us all with, including mine from the years of braces which made me look like Jaws had he worn plaid skirts while gnawing on James Bond. Still, there's something strangely curious about looking at yourself in 16 or more annual portraits that illustrate how quickly you changed even though time seemed to stand still when you were in grade school. Once we are out of school we rarely bother with the annual portrait and one morning you wake up, look tiredly in the mirror and wonder who the old prune is staring back at you. I've been thinking that getting our picture taken in a photobooth once a year or so might be a fun way to watch ourselves age. :)

Perhaps the only photos of myself have been taken in a photobooth for various identification purposes like passes for the underground, but I've always had a fascination with photobooths for some inexplicable reason. How can you not love a contraption that takes such bad pictures that they even make a Finnish immigration officer titter and smirk at them? I bought a copy of Photobooth expecting to read the history of the device and anecdotal personal vignettes from people who have had a love for them over the years, but sadly it only has a few pages of text and the rest is filled with photobooth strips from the last 70 years or so. The photos are amazingly interesting and some of them make you truly curious about what ever happened to the person staring back at you. The author has a site called the found photo, but it seems to be under permanent construction which is a pity since a site filled with found photobooth photos could really be a wonderful archive to browse through much like a grandparent's shoebox in the attic.

There isn't much at all on the net that I could find about the Siberian immigrant named Anatol Josepho who patented the concept for the photobooth in 1925. There's a history book for just about every other obscure and esoteric topic these days, why not the photobooth, its inventor and the people who loved the photos? In an age where everything is pushing towards the digital, there's something comforting about the steadfast analog technology that still works well, even if you have to stand around the booth trying to look casual while waiting for the pictures to develop. I found the photobooth directory which looks to be an ambitious project that could use a little more love as film booths get harder to find in the US with every passing day.