Photobooth Portraits
For the better part of a century, people have gone through the familiar routine of drawing photobooth curtains to create private or mysterious world, mugged for the camera alone or with lovers, collected the photo printout and signed the back to indelibly record the occasion down in their personal history. Kenneth R. Fletcher at the Smithsonian Magazine talks to Nakki Goranin about her new cultural history, American Photobooth, and has this to say:
As Goranin, a photographer and self-described romantic, sees it, photo strips tell the story of 20th-century American history from the ground up. The images in her new book, culled from thousands she has collected at auctions, flea markets and antiques stores, show down-at-the-heels farmers in overalls, wartime sweethearts and 1950s boys with greased hair and ducktails. She points out a photo of a World War II-era couple kissing passionately. “Day before he left,” the notation reads.
Before the photobooth first appeared, in the 1920s, most portraits were made in studios. The new, inexpensive process made photography accessible to everyone. “For 25 cents people could go and get some memory of who they were, of a special occasion, of a first date, an anniversary, a graduation,” Goranin says. “For many people, those were the only photos of themselves that they had.”
Because there is no photographer to intimidate, photobooth subjects tend to be much less self-conscious. The result—a young boy embracing his mother or teenagers sneaking a first kiss—is often exceptionally intimate. “It’s like a theater that’s just you and the lens,” Goranin says. “And you can be anyone you want to be.”
Apparently photobooths, or at least the digital variety, have made a tremendous resurgence in years. But, off the top of my head, I can only think of two places to find one in Toronto. Now I’ll be on the look out to spot more.
3 years ago