out of the booth

way back in february, I stood in a cozy little shop called ampersand and thumbed through boxes of old snapshots. while I happily mined for vintage photographic gold, the owner (myles) told me about about a photobooth exhibit they were planning for the summer. I was already totally smitten with the place but that sort of did it. that absolutely sealed the deal. of course, summer felt like seven hundred years away and I completely forgot about the show. up until a couple of days ago.



out of the booth features photobooth enlargements from the robert e. jackson collection and opens tonight. portland peeps, I'm fairly certain this will be awesome. unfortunately, I am currently several hundred miles from portland (more on that later) but some of you are not. and I am thinking you should go to this. because I'm telling you, it's really going to be something. also, myles says there will be air-conditioning and you and I both know you're right smack dab in the middle of a no-joke sort of heat wave. how much more time can you spend at the movies? at the library? in the pool? or heaven forbid, the mall? you know you're running out of ideas. get thee to ampersand! for the opening tonight, ryan brubaker will be on hand to shoot photobooth-like portraits with his polaroid camera. also available: free cold drinks. free. cold. drinks. and air-conditioning. AIR CONDITIONING. but most importantly, a stunning collection of vintage photobooth images. witness above. witness below.



if you can't make it tonight, out of the booth runs through august 23rd. and I can't say much yet but it looks like I may be participating in a little something special (in conjunction with the show) before the show's end. details to come.

if you go, tell myles I said hi. and tell him andrea sent you.

photobooth friday

three years ago, I was in new york with my brother. and while I was there, I bought this little photobooth frame at the 39th street fleamarket. let me tell you, I had to dig through hundreds (and hundreds) of old snapshots to find her. but she was totally worth it. these are the ones that you find at the bottom of the box-- they hide in the cracks, slip in and out of envelopes, piles, fingers. surely it would be easier to dump the box upside down and start my search there. problem is, once I see all those old snapshots, I'm as good as gone. I have to look at every single one of them. yes, I do. and yes, how very OCD of me but I'm sorry, it must be done. I only leave with a few but I have to look at every. last. one. someone needs to. story after story after story, so many stories. they are lost people who need to be seen.

this is what I think:

she was an extraordinary speller and favored the scent of wild violets and coffee.

she kept her valuables in a red shoebox beneath the bathroom sink, behind a stack of mismatched towels.

she had a goldfish named ching ching whom she talked to regularly. though only after she was sure everyone had already gone to bed.

this is what I think. but it could change at any moment. because this is how it is with found photographs. their details are wonderfully mercurial and their stories-- as wide open as the sky.

well hello, photobooth friday. hello there.

photobooth friday

firstly: I think her name was something like a judith. and she wanted to be a writer but ended up in cosmetology school instead. you know, because her uncle said he'd pay for it and all.

secondly: dig that ridiculously fantastic coat collar. and something about her pose, the plaid background and striped awning at the top of the frame has me happy in a way I can't really explain.

lastly (and most importantly): thank you, photobooth angel, for sending me a christmas card full of vintage photobooth snapshots. all those little sepia-toned squares falling into my lap when I least expected it. like manna from heaven. a thousand times over, thank you. (you know who you are)

and the first official photobooth friday postings of the new year are (drum roll, please):

jesC
acumamakiki
a.stray
bobby S
scrumdillydilly
jördis
matt!?

(with honorable mentions to nessie noodle and woof nanny)

photobooth friday

I'm calling him lenny because it feels right.

and I totally believe he got caught smoking behind the tool shed more times than he would care to admit. he didn't have anything to prove, really-- it was a habit born out of nervousness. I think he ate large green pickles everyday for lunch and was very careful not to let the juice stain his crisp white shirts. clothes were important to lenny. he knew what he liked, he knew cut and quality, had an eye for the kind of details most people missed. this was a special gift, he thought. not to be squandered or taken lightly. I believe he winked at shy girls on the bus who then returned home to write secret poems about his dreamy eyes in small diaries with brass locks. by the age of ten, he had developed an original catch phrase, a personal motto and a 7-year plan that included moving to a small one bedroom apartment just outside the city. he would not settle for a small closet, though. the apartment could be small but the closet must be spacious, he thought. and he dreamt daily of selling shiny convertibles to women with platinum blonde curls and spectator heels.

lenny didn't understand anyone who refused the services of a good tailor. and he didn't trust anyone who failed to put out a dish of candy corn at halloween. once he lived on his own, the first thing he was going to do was track down a skilled tailor. and you can bet that he would never, ever forget to put out a bowl of candy corn the last two weeks of october. you could put money on that, he thought.

moremoremore with the photobooth friday thing:

jesC
jek-a-go-go (and this one too, please)
the whole self (yes, and this one too)
nessie noodle
woof nanny
acumamakiki (and this one too)
velvet vox
leSophie

(and for an absolutely fantastic set of vintage found photobooth snapshots, check out imaginary relatives)

(extra special thanks to lovely miss brina for sending lenny my way, so much good is coming to you, sister-- so much good)

photobooth friday

my stash of vintage/found photobooth snaps. I heart them all. I talk to them in the wee hours of the night and listen to them whisper deep, profound secrets. um, not really. but I do like to look at them.

because you can't (you won't and you don't) stop:

leSophie
jesC
scrumdillyumscious
the whole self
a.stray
woof nanny
acumamakiki

and this one because it is ridiculously fantastic.

photobooth friday

(found this at the 26th street fleamarket in new york a couple of years ago-- on the back, the name 'eva' is written in a gorgeous, faint script)

"a picture is worth a thousand words, knowing that words spoken are often false. memory and imagination merge with fact and transform a single moment into an entire story. and eventually, all we will remember is the moment defined and distilled in the picture. when our memories are no longer accessible as actual memories, when they are simply stories that we tell, we will look at ourselves and show our friends and will say, 'see here, this is how I was.' it doesn't matter if the situation represented changed dramatically the very next day, that the lover we were so cozy with has broken our hearts, or that we have grown old and no longer resemble our youthful selves. in the photobooth picture, unlike any other portrait or photograph, truth and fiction easily commingle. in a photobooth we choose the moment and the way in which we represent ourselves. we choose our truth."
~babette hines, from her book photobooth

more photobooth truths generously shared here:

leSophie
jesC
nessie noodle
the whole self
lovegreendog
scrumdillyumscious

(more of babette hines here)

photobooth friday

I decided to go with an old favorite today (the story behind it is here). imagine my surprise when I realized it had been posted exactly one year ago today-- april the 27th, 2005.

others all up in the photoboothness:

jesC
pickle-b
art junk
poppy
leSophie
quietfish
mad organica
scrumdillyumscious

(and thanks for the maddest of all props, jeffrey-- I do believe you and 52 projects are the BEE'S KNEES. endlessly inspired by you, I am)

photobooth friday

I don't know these women. I don't have any names or dates. no stories to tell today except that this was the first vintage 'found' photobooth strip that I ever bought.

right out of high school and into my early twenties, I went a little crazy over vintage clothing, hats, jewelry. taken with the notion of old school glamour, I hung dresses, costumes and beaded cardigans all over my walls along side hats with huge roses and veils. I surrounded myself with piles of vintage jewelry, old perfume bottles and posters of ginger rogers and marilyn monroe (went through a real marilyn monroe phase in high school-- I think I even wrote an english paper about the suspicious nature surrounding her death, no lie). so it was sort of love at first sight when I happened onto this photobooth snapshot at a fleamarket in ohio. I was (am) crazy about those smiles, that fantastic feathered hat, the angles and the slight blur of motion in each shot. so alive, these women and I was fascinated by the idea that I knew nothing about them but now owned a little piece of their history. superb entertainment for a quarter, I thought. so it came home with me where I tacked it up along side all my vintage goods. couldn't exactly put my finger on why, but it made me happy.

years later and I no longer decorate my walls with vintage clothing. oh, I still have a little bit of a thing for it but I boxed up or sold most of my pieces. some of it saved for ava, some of it saved for myself. much too difficult to let go of all of it. and I still love old things (understatement of the year, ha, DECADE) and continue to surround myself with it. my tastes have dramatically shifted, though-- as well as the way I display the things I love. the tacked-up photobooth snaps-- those remain. there's something about the quality that's just so rich, so gorgeous (why can't they make photobooths like that today? we should all look so glamorous and radiant). anyway, it's one of the few constants after all these years. something about them continues to make me happy.

and I'd love to hear your thoughts on the story of these women. oh yes I would.


more photobooth friday drama and glamour:

lovegreendog
jesC
pickle-b
mad organica
anatomist
I'm channeling doris day
domestic adventures
meegan blue
lulu's world
wardomatic

(and check out this lovely photo that jenny sent my way. also: a call for entries for an upcoming photobooth exhibit in philadelphia (found on photobooth.net). and if you are so taken with vintage photobooth snapshots, take a little lookie here.)

help me

here's what's going to end up happening this weekend: I'm going to get all wrapped up in transforming the ava-girl into a butterfly fairy creature and the ez into a baby beatnik. and I will be too tired to think about my own costume. and there will be an extra added/special bonus edition of lameness that will flavor the usual excuses. we will listen to each other mutter things like how we're too tired and please, don't we already have enough to do, isn't this really all about the kids anyway? and let's just try to get through the day so we can do what we REALLY want to do which is make ourselves sick on candy corn while watching the original halloween movie with jamie lee curtis then pass out on the couch and blah, blah, blah. at some point, I'll come to my senses and want to throw something together to wear. I'll find myself going through costume boxes in the attic, frantically throwing together whatever I find. I predict that I will stand before ward with a crooked old wig on my head and some sort of weird dress and ask, "is this anything? could this be a costume? WHAT AM I?" (which reminds me of the time I bought a cheap blonde wig from k-mart and smeared bright red lipstick all around my mouth and called myself 'crazy mary').

or maybe I could just squeeze myself into a rubbersuit like the happy child above and call it a day. though something tells me that this scenario has absolutely nothing to do with halloween. but whatever.

found photograph #136

"to collect photographs is to collect the world." -susan sontag

found photograph #268

the real story behind this photograph is probably a million times better than anything I could ever, ever make up.

all speculations are welcome, of course.

butterfly

in my tireless search for old photos, I have come to appreciate the flip side. I never paid much attention to the back of the snapshots until after I brought them home. guess I was too busy looking at the front. and then one day I discovered a world of goodness could be found if you just took the time to look. words, phrases, names and dates reveal themselves at the flick of a wrist, and you feel as if you have stumbled across the very clues you might need to unlock the mystery behind the unknown subject. such an eloquent vernacular, this text. what I have come across has often been charming and oddball-like, sometimes creepy, always interesting. scrawled on the back of the above photo in a faded and wobbly script:

"I thought I was a butterfly."

something about this makes me happy.

topless

after enduring a long week of cold and rainy grey, we are now experiencing steamy heat. I feel like walking around in my bra just like mildred here. I have no idea if that is really her name (probably not) but she screams 'mildred' to me. just look at her. you know she was so proud of this photo but kept it hidden in the bottom of her underwear drawer (just beneath the girdles) like some delicious little secret. I am thinking she took it out from time to time, secretly pleased with her risky, topless desert venture. what would she think of where her snapshot has ended up?

this is precisely why I collect these photos. it's so easy to get lost in the story.

hooked

I'm not sure when it began, the somewhat obsessive collecting of found photographs. I do remember when the habit kicked into high gear though-- we were in east atlanta at a great little junk shop called 'craptastic' (a name so wrong it can only be right), happily navigating our way through stacks and piles and boxes of stuff (aka crap). as always, hoping to unearth something worth all the unearthing. I had just decided against purchasing a pair of authentic seventies platform clogs (clogs that also doubled as roller skates: CLOGS AS SKATES, PEOPLE) when I spied an open suitcase in the corner. the sign taped to the side said 'ADOPT A RELATIVE, TEN CENTS' and there were hundreds of old photos inside, mainly snapshot-style/photobooth portraits of men. I spent the good part of an hour deciding which photos to take home with me and the ones you see here were (are) my absolute favorites. they continue to stand out in a collection that now rivals all collections. I fell in love with the faces and good lord, the style-- effortless style for days, what I imagine it must be like to be smooth, the very definition of the word cool. kind of tragic that they had no one to treasure them, no family memebers to lovingly pass them down through the generations. with this, I was hungry to collect. I snatched them up wherever and whenever they could be found: an antique store in illinois, a flea market in italy, an abandoned box at a swap meet. anywhere and everywhere I traveled, I looked and looked and always managed to bring at least a couple home with me. I am certainly not original in my pursuit here-- people have been deep in this gig long before I hit the scene. and I have only begun to scratch the surface of the resources out there (if you're at all interested in vernacular photography, take a lookie here, here and here). the appeal is universal-- I think we are unable to resist the anonymous nature of these photographs and how engaging they are to the imagination. the story, photographer and subject are all unknown, leaving the viewer to come to their own conclusions (or not) regarding said discarded snapshot. plus, there's the aesthetic-- rich looking sepias and silvers that are hard to come by today. and I think people love the idea of rescuing these unknowns from an eternity in the local landfill. I don't know about you, but I can't stand the idea of my family photos lost in a sea of slimy garbage somewhere. that being said, I cannot save every lost photo I find. I have had to narrow my search (and collection) and find myself especially drawn to those that showcase individuality and personal style, relationships and odd little details. special bonus points (dingdingding) if I find personal handwriting on the back. I am hoping to share them here every once in awhile. too good to be hidden away in my cigar boxes, too good not to share.

it pains me to say that 'craptastic' has long since gone out of business. I do regret passing up those platform clogs/rollerskates (I'm begging you, dear reader-- share the vision and imagine the GREATNESS) but at least I didn't turn my back on the contents of the suitcase in the corner. here's to photographic orphans everywhere and two bucks well spent.