Violeta Tayeh – Artist of the Booth

My previous post about Jeff Nachtigall came about through his image and mine appearing on the same page of Meags Fitzgerald’s photobooth book. Another photobooth aficionado, Violeta Tayeh also appeared on the same page.

Here is some of Violeta’s story in her own words –

I only came across photobooths in 2010 through a relationship I had developed with Dirklancer (Jeff Nachtigall) through the Lomography Society website. There he posted a link to his personal blog, The Art of Waiting where he held a photobooth competition.

The lomography community always has online photo competitions with different themes in mind and between 2007 and 2010, I always entered. I’d tell my husband we needed to go to the beach because I wanted to take some shots to enter a comp. That was not unusual. So entering Jeff’s was not a stretch at all. It was just a different type of camera.

Jeff sent me a link to photobooth.net and I used their locator to find some photobooths in my area. Turned out that all the booths in Maryland and Washington DC were either out of service, or removed. I looked up Philadelphia, located 3 booths to visit and made a day trip out of it. 

I painted my own backgrounds (see above).  I fell in love with this form of photography that day. The problem is that a few months after these strips were taken, we went back to visit Philly and the store which had the booth was closed down. The photobooth was auctioned off. Since there weren’t many booths near me, I tried to visit booths when we’d go on vacation somewhere, like this one: 

So up until the Photobooth Convention in 2014, I had taken less than 25 strips, so not too much art making was going on. But at the convention, my husband and I took over 50 strips together in two days! Definitely wished I could have stayed for the last day. I probably would have been able to make larger pieces with multiple strips. It’s difficult trying to make artwork with more than two strips when someone else is waiting in line to use the booth so I didn’t try to do that but I did pick up a few techniques from talking to others there.