The Punch & Judy Man

Last year Tony Lamont, of the fascinating blog XrayPics, very kindly sent me three wonderful photobooth strips, all of which were taken at a Reading Cinemas digital photobooth. As well as being a consultant radiologist, Tony has two unusual hobbies. He creates artworks using anonymous x-rays as his source material and he performs Punch and Judy shows at festivals around Australia. For his performances he made all of the ten puppets including the clothing and the puppet booth. Tony tells us more about his work –

My latest puppet is more of a small doll, an image of Donald Trump who appears in the show and gets thrown off the stage into the toilet by the runcible Mr Punch. The audience claps every time. Meanwhile I am building a set of six puppets, for the “three little pigs”, I want to do the show in Italian for schools; I Tre Porcellini. I also have concept plans for a couple of tiny dancers which can be used for close-up pavement entertainment. These last are doing my head in! But my love will always be with Mr Punch and his lovely wife Judy. 

One day I will bring Punch and Judy down to Melbourne, and you will have to come to see us.

I hope when Tony is in Melbourne I will be able to tempt him and his puppet friends into my favourite 1970s dip and dunk photobooth at Flinders Street Station.

You can see that Tony is highly skilled with his puppetry just by the expressiveness of these photos. I do find it fun that Tony’s performances are in the confined space of a booth, as are mine.  That is if you think of what I’ve been doing in my photobooth photos as performances!

I love these quirky and funny strips. I feel very privileged to have them in my collection. Please scroll down to see more photobooth photos and some of Tony with his booth theatre.