Photo booths, as you will be reading in today's cover story, are a thing of the past. Yet, their nostalgia and influence are still with us today. They have entered into our collective memories as the method by which we remember the good times with the good people. The prints usually consisted of five boxes, each with its own theme.
Box #1
Confused. How do we work this machine? Crap, I wasn't ready. Alright, here we go.
Box #2
All smiles. Possibly a hug. Her left eye is blinking, but her right eye is open. I have that weird red eye.
Box #3
Kiss on the cheek. She looks like she's in lust, I look like I'm in pain. It was a good moment, just looks bad.
Box #4
Crazy. Humor. Throw up your arms, shake your hair like no one's watching. Devils horns to the Gods of Rock. Utilize that tongue in pure Jagger fashion.
Box #5
Quaint. Leaning back. Arms intertwined. Both sets of eyes wide open. Beautiful couple.
Watch any movie or television show that uses the clichéd technique of using a photo booth, and you'll see the pictures occur in this same fashion. Usually it's part of some heartfelt, yet painfully corny montage with "Walking on Sunshine" playing in the background.
Fun times must be had, and once they have been had, let them be remembered. So we use our picture phones and digital cameras to bring pixilated faces to LCD screens of some type, devoid of quality. In the film vs. digital photography war, it has led us to desire quality or versatility.
Either way, with all the capabilities and options we have reached with photography, photo booths are still attractive under some weird obsessive sense of Americana. There are plenty of booths that still use real black and white film found in NYC and on the beach boardwalks of Jersey. They aren't ignored like the candy machines in laundromats, but kept up and refilled on a regular basis so we can sit behind a curtain with a dear close friend/s to take three or four pictures that will be held on to forever. Allow the fight for possession to begin.
These strips are real, they are tangible. They aren't memory on your picture phone. If you loose them, its matter does not become ram or rom let loose to run free in an operating system. If the picture strip is lost, it is hidden somewhere, waiting to be found.
If everything is kept alive in a server, how will scientists and historians of the future be able to determine the way our culture and society functioned? The server computers will have been destroyed along with all our records, pictures, identities, and online picture albums. The scientists will find spoons and cars, the technology of the past, but not the technology of the last few years and what we have in store for the future. So when our civilization goes up in a Terminator 2 like kaboom, the scientists who dig us up 4000 years from now will think we only got as far as 1993.
So print out some of your pictures on your picture phone, even though they look like utter garbage, and put it somewhere for those future scientists to find.
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