My colleague Jessica Gelt recently reported on the newly renovated downtown lounge Elevate’s pseudo-photo booth, “iSnap,” which sends photos straight to Facebook or Twitter - just like a cellphone camera!īut they can’t claim the unvarnished authenticity of the print photos. On the contrary, the photo booth concept has gone meta. This is not to say digital photography is losing its charm. ” list runs a Google search and finds it on a blog or online scrapbook. Lopez posed this hypothetical: You put a picture online, and your friends and relations repost it. I’m not just talking about that embarrassing shot of beer pong inebriation. Once our friends Like it, Digg it, Share it and Tag it, our online picture flies out into the universe and an uncertain, unlimited after-life. To get back to my nemesis at the after-party, digital images have a way of spiraling out of our control. By contrast, Lopez still has photo booth pictures he took with each guest at his birthday party six years ago. Silver Lake filmmaker Angel Lopez said he sees pictures of friends on the Tumblr accounts of people they don’t even know. They take place in real time in a private space we chose to occupy.Īnd everyone in a photo booth picture is your real friend. But suddenly, we’re seeing the virtue of limits. Clicking through photos in front of a screen is an evanescent thrill that can’t compare to leafing through a photo album, or spotting a childhood shot of a friend spilling out of a cardboard box.ĭigital technology gave us photography without limits. The march of technology has wiped out so many things we used to hold in our hands and savor. Photo booth photos fulfill my yearning for a lost physicality. But in the photo booth world, “this is real.” In the digital world, “you could take a picture of a cockroach and make it look like Godzilla,” Orange County resident Fernando Lazaro, an office worker, said, explaining why he and a friend ducked into the photo booth one night last week at the One-Eyed Gypsy bar downtown. “With film you only have one shot and that’s that. “I’m so over digital,” said Bess Byers, a Venice marketing researcher darting out of the One-Eyed Gypsy’s vintage booth. Once the money is plunked into the little metal slot, we have to live with the consequences.
When we don’t like a cellphone photo, we hit delete and do it over. So what’s behind the photo booth revival? At heart, I think it is a longing for authenticity. And with a few extra taps, we can beam them to our friends and relations almost as quickly. Three minutes after we fed three bucks in the slot, the film strip, damp with developing chemicals, slid down the metal chute, and we were grabbing it away from each other to see how we looked.īut now? There’s a cellphone camera in every pocket. We had to wait days for the drugstore to develop our film. Corporations, sensing the next big thing, are even renting photo booths for promotional purposes.īack in the day, photo booths made sense. In a handful of hipster bars - Cha Cha Lounge, Edendale Grill - people are lining up to cram into photo closets, pull the curtain closed and wait for the flash to pop and freeze their goofy expressions. Which is why it’s strange that something so old-school and hokey as the vintage photo booth is making a comeback. Rest assured, we are all still our own celebrities, recording every move for our 2,568 friends. Had the generation that documents each new cocktail and dessert tray on Facebook finally realized it was over-exposed? And not only that he would think someone my age would stay up that late if I didn’t have to.
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