“Babbette Hines is a collector of vernacular photography. Her gallery Found: Photo is located in Los Angeles.”
I have been bewitched by photobooths since I was knee-high to a grasshopper. I am not entirely certain what spawned the fiendish fascination with them, but not only did I jump in jublilant glee when I came across one randomly, but I began to collect anything & all things that had to do with them. This pertained to getting all of my most beloved & dearest friends in one with me, mostly (and also making collages out of the strips), but anything I am able to scare up about photobooths is fair game. In a (picture) perfect world, I would have my very own photobooth in the foyer and make it a stipulation once you entered our digs that you MUST have a strip taken. Never underestimate how much I am not ever kidding! Consider yourself warned for when I make my first mill. (<– And I will probably make a plastic windmill before I ever make a mill-mill, so don’t go getting yourself all gussied up…… yet!)
One holiday, my mother got me the book Photobooth by Babbette Hines (how GREAT is the name Babbette, by the way?!). I absolutely adore it! What I learned from this book is that in 1925 a Siberian immigrant named Anatol Josepho had the brainchild of a bantam booth with a curtain where people could take portraits of themselves instantly. Because of him, the first photobooth was created. It took about twenty years before there were more than thirty thousand in the U.S. — this large number produced, mostly, due to WWII because the soldiers and their sweethearts exchanged photos through many written love letters home, and visa versa. They became a fixture in drugstores/stores all over, but in the 1960’s Polaroid pictures really threatened the automatic photo contraption. (I love Polaroids, too, but BOO!)
