Booth Investing

I wrote a guest post for Photobooth.net this week summarizing my trip to Europe. For anyone curious, they best visit it here.

Here's a photo that I didn't include in that post of a booth in La Citadium, a clothing store in Paris. The booth belongs to La Joyeuse de Photographie (Camille and Igor) and it never gets a break in that location. Camille told me how many strips are taken there everyday and my eyeballs almost popped out of my head.

It got me thinking about buying a booth as an investment. For as long as I can remember I've wanted one for myself, to put in a shed or in a garage and use it for art projects and to document my growing family. It's only after meeting a few photobooth savvy business people that I realized how profitable they can be in the right location and if you service it yourself. I've spoken with a friend seriously about buying one together.... but then where would we put it? Looks like I need to find a place to call home before I can take that step.

Autumn in the Windy City

While I was at the Photobooth Convention in May, I met many wonderful people. Amongst these people were Anthony and Andrea Vizzari who own A&A Studios in Chicago. A&A is a really interesting business, they refurbish vintage photobooths and either preserve the mechanical elements for chemical photos or convert it to digital. These high quality booths are for sale and available as rentals for events. They also operate a shop which sells vintage cameras and related paraphernalia. They have a really creative team of people working with them and are leaders in the grassroots photobooth movement.

So… it makes me insanely happy to get to work with them this fall. I’ll be doing an internship in Chicago from September to December, working on special projects. We are still developing/finalizing said projects but it seems like I will get to use my illustration, design, sewing, bookbinding and crafting knowledge, all while being in the midst of photobooths. Needless to say, this is a dream job and I’m sure the experience will provide me with some great insights for my graphic novel.

In the meanwhile, I’m planning my European Photobooth Expedition. It’s shaping up with only a few details to still confirm. I also hope to fit in quick trips to Toronto and New York in the fall, which should mostly complete the research for Photobooth, A Biography.

This coming week I’m going to visit Newfoundland with my parents and sister. It’ll be my first time and it’s also the only Canadian province I haven’t been to yet. With my new ties to Auto-Photo (the company that makes and services photobooths in Canada) I have secured the locations of 4 photobooths along our route that are not yet documented for Photobooth.net’s Locator feature. I’m happy to visit these gems before they are gone. And generally, I’m just happy and grateful for all the new experiences!

Le Photobooth-Expedition se poursuit en Europe!

I should start this post by saying that every day I wake feeling so fortunate to get to work on Photobooth, A Biography and that I’m extra thankful for how seamlessly the progress for is coming along. With the help of a lot of wonderful people, everything has been glitch-free so far. Last week, thanks to my web programmer friend Scott Borys, I made a simple webpage for the graphic novel and will update it when there are significant advancements. Check it out!

And speaking of significant advancements, I’m pleased to say that the Photobooth Expedition continues this summer with a trip to Europe! I’ll be there for almost three weeks, from July 18 to August 10. Each city I stop in has a purpose, whether it is to see a photobooth art exhibition, meet booth owners, artists and curators. I’m still working out a lot of details, but so far these are the cities and this is the order I’ll be visiting: Brussels, Paris, Amsterdam, (maybe) Cologne, Nimes, (hopefully) Gap, (maybe) Zurich, Florence, (maybe) Cesena and Milan.  If anyone has friends or family in Brussels or Milan that I could stay with for a couple nights that would be much appreciated!

Meanwhile, I’m also finishing up the last touches on the Concept Art booklet for Photobooth, A Biography and it should be ready to buy online, at my Etsy shop, by Friday. This is a sneak peek at the cover, the hand is a flap that keeps the book closed when the quarter is inserted. I have a lot more updates to share but I have to get back to work so I’ll save it for another day!

"Femme Avec Un Chapeau Rouge" Series

This project requires a bit of back tracking to explain it best. In 2002 I was looking through some old magazines in art class, in a French haut-couture magazine from the early 90’s I found a grainy but captivating image. I wasn’t sure what it was but something about this woman dining with this huge red hat really fascinated me. In 2003 I tried to paint the image to the best of my abilities in acrylic paint. In 2005 I found the image again and thought it would be an interesting experiment to paint the photograph again as a measure of my artistic growth, this time in oil paint. In 2006, I had a university painting class where the teacher had asked us to work with repetition. I decided to test my painting skills, but also artistic range once again and painted the “Femme avec un Chapeau Rouge” over twenty times in various mediums and styles. Above is the original magazine image (I drew on the horizontal and vertical lines in 2003 for reference) and the first and second attempts. On the right are a select few of my attempts from 2006.


In the fall of 2009 I spent a month in France. While I was there I was looking for non-digital photobooths (a personal passion of mine, see old post) and was visiting more booths than normal, though I didn’t necessarily have ideas every time I was taking pictures. A week into my trip, in the children’s section of the gift shop for the Musée D’Orsay I found a mask. Being in France and seeing this red had, I was automatically reminded of the magazine photo from years before. For the rest of the trip the mask and signature pose of the woman became a default pose for me while photoboothing. Since returning to Canada I’ve played around with the background in these photos because the background in the original photo is very non-descript and it was always a difficult formal decision to make when painting. The mask is conveniently light and small so it’s been ideal to bring it with me for my other travels this year. I brought the mask on my latest trip to Ontario, Quebec, New York, Massachusetts and Illinois. I’m also going to bring it with me while touring an improv show across Canada in May and when I visit Australia and Japan in July.

Here are some pictures I have taken with the mask during my travels so far.

The next step in the project is to do a stop-motion photobooth animation, done in a similar style to an animation I made with artist Pamela Norrish last year, which you can check out here.

Photobooth Pictures in Art and Abroad

Anyone who knows me knows of my passion/ obsession with photobooths. I’ve been collecting non-digital photobooth pictures for seven years now and have thousands of pictures. Taking and collecting photos is primarily a hobby but I have also used them in my artwork. I store my photos in archival plastic sheets and have divided them into four categories; Found Photos, Donated Photos, Film Stills (more on this later) and Self Portraits. I own almost all the published books on the subject matter and I’m especially interested in their history. This summer when I travelled to Australia I was happy to hunt for the remaining non-digital booths in Sydney for Photobooth.net’s Locator feature on their website. I was curious about what I would be able to find in Europe. At one time the continent’s train stations and streets were rampant with “Photoautomats” but today they have been almost entirely replaced with easier to maintain digital booths. In Paris I visited a few booths that are owned by businesses committed to preserving these iconic machines but it was only in Berlin that I found the occasional classic black & white “dip’n’dunk” booth in the streets.


Nevertheless, Paris was a real photobooth highlight for me because the Centre de Georges Pompidou had a very thoroughly curated exhibition titled “La Subversion des Images” or “The Subversion of Images” which featured Surrealist photography and film. The exhibition had original photobooth pictures by famous Surrealists such as Paul Eluard, André Breton, Louis Aragon, René Magritte, Yves Tanguy, Luis Brunel, Salivador Dali and others, taken for both fun and to use in their artwork.


Top photo is of the Fotoautomat in the Palais de Tokyo in Paris. Bottom picture is of René Magritte's "Je ne vois pas la [femme] cachée dans la forêt", 1929.

Back from Europe and overflowing with inspiration

I feel a little bad for a leaving my blog unattended for so long, but I had good reason; I was overseas taking in some culture! First on my list was France, where I stayed with an artist friend in Paris before I headed south to Provence, the Alps and the Mediterranean. I returned to Paris for another week and then headed for Berlin where I stayed with a musician friend. The gray skies and freezing temperatures were pretty dismal compared to the sun in Southern France. I was in for more of the same when I flew to London to stay with some actor/improviser friends. I created a bit of a homebase there and took small trips to Glasgow, Edinburgh and Totnes (a small village in Devon). I returned to London for a few last splendid days and flew to Toronto from there... more about that later.

As you might imagine I saw a lot of art in that time, I visited approximately two galleries/museums everyday for two months. There is a point when you just can’t absorb anymore visual stimuli, (I hit it a few times), though there were still a few stellar exhibitions that managed to resonate with me. Since I’ve been back a lot of people have been asking me about the best shows I saw, so here’s a list of the best temporary exhibitions I visited while I was abroad (in order that I saw them):

-Chasing Napoleon at the Palais de Tokyo, Paris
-La Subversion des Images at the Centre Pompidou, Paris
-La Biennale de Lyon hosted primarily at La Sucriere, Lyon
-Né dans la Rue at Fondation Cartier, Paris
-Elles at the Centre Pomipdou, Paris
-Thomas Demand (retrospective) at the Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin
-Kiosk – Modes of Multiplication, presented by Christoph Keller at the Kunstbibliothek, Berlin
-Anish Kapoor (retrospective) at the Royal Academy of Arts, London
-Jill Magid: Authority to Remove at the Tate Modern, London
-The End of the Line: Attitudes in Drawing at the Fruit Market Gallery, Edinburgh
-Sophie Calle: Talking to Strangers at the White Chapel Gallery, London


















Photos are of 2/3 of Barry McGee's installation, titled "Installation" at the Biennale de Lyon.