History, memoir collide in Photobooth
Graphic novel explores an intimate space
In June 2003, Meags Fitzgerald and a friend celebrated their last day of Grade 10 by going to a photobooth and posing for goofy, impromptu pictures.
It wasn’t Fitzgerald’s first time, but on that particular occasion, she writes, “something clicked. Suddenly, all I wanted to do was use photobooths, or go ‘boothing,’ as I called it.” The abbreviation made it official: a serious hobby had been born.
Over the next decade the Edmontonian would frequent just about every photobooth she passed. At school, the budding artist and improviser became known as “the photobooth girl,” carefully cataloguing a collection that was growing by leaps and bounds. She started experimenting with the creative possibilities of the medium, and also got interested in the booths themselves. Where did they come from? How did they work? And, with the rise of digital photography, did they have a future?
Those questions are answered, and then some, in Fitzgerald’s first book, a fascinating graphic novel called Photobooth: A Biography (Conundrum) that’s equal parts history and memoir. Fitzgerald tries to understand how the role of photobooths has changed over the decades — in the early 20th century, they were proof of the democratization of technology; later, a practical government tool for mug shots and passport photos — as well as what it is about these old-fashioned curios that continues to hold her attention today.
“Photobooths, unlike any other form of photography, do an amazing job at actually spontaneously capturing the truth in a moment,” Fitzgerald, who is currently based in Montreal, told me over the phone. “Photobooths don’t let you lie to yourself. If you’re having a bad day, you’re going to have a bad photo.
“And there’s no negative. It goes directly to the paper. So every picture you’ll ever take in a photobooth is entirely unique, and it’s entirely yours.”
From an artistic point of view, mean while, she’s drawn to the strictness of the photobooth’s mechanical process: “It’s a literal box you have to think outside of.”
In addition to the richness and vibrancy of the illustrations themselves, Fitzgerald’s book does what any good object biography should, by charting the larger impact photobooths have made around the world. She gives us the biography of the man who invented them, Siberia- born Anatol Josepho. She shows how the booths became rare private spaces for marginalized groups like gay couples. She gets into detail about the different makes, models and developing processes. Finally, she becomes part of the modern movement to revitalize and appreciate the booths as artistic instruments.
Because of the depth of her research, and how much of her own life story is represented on the page, Fitzgerald worked at a rapid pace, right down to the wire — sending in new pages the day before the book went to the printer — to get things exactly right.
“My publisher was happy to delay it six months, or whatever,” Fitzgerald says. “He didn’t care. But I wanted the book to come out at least a full year before photobooths in Canada disappear.”
And there’s the rub. As Fitzgerald makes clear in the book, the old-fashioned chemical photobooth is an endangered species, either being covertly replaced by digital look-alikes or else junked entirely. In fact, they’re already living on borrowed time: only one company on the planet still produces paper for the blackand-white machines, while the paper for colour photos stopped being made seven years ago. Current stocks are expected to run out for good by summer 2015.
By putting her book out into the world now, Fitzgerald hopes readers might be inspired to try to save the technology, or at least to pay their local booth one final visit.
“Giving people a heads up that this is happening is the least I could do for photobooths,” she says, “so they aren’t disappearing, slowly, in the night. There are a few Canadian cities that don’t have any. And it’s not like they put a closing sign on the photobooth. It’s just taken away one day.”
Edmonton is not one of those cities — yet. The enthusiast site photobooth.org lists 10 such booths in service, and one of them, which sits in City Centre mall, next to the movie theatre, is featured on the very first page of Photobooth: A Biography.
The other day I went back to see if it was still there. Sure enough, it was. I stood and looked at it for a minute, comparing the worn-down reality against Fitzgerald’s illustration and wondering how long it will be until this booth, too, is quietly taken away and dismantled. (It uses colour paper, which means it’s got a year at best.) Then I ducked inside, pulled the curtain shut, plonked down my four dollars, and waited for the camera to flash.