What a gloriously sexy couple! At top is my favourite photo of the woman. The third photo is my favourite of the man. I think the final photo is the best of them as a couple.
I am guessing this was taken in the 1980s. It is a found-photo from the USA.
Leicester Railway Station, 16 June 2002
I found this strip of photos on my way to work when I lived in Leicstershire in the East Midlands in the UK. A friend who was looking through my collection recently, commented that he appears to be very professionally posed before the camera. He does have the knack of presenting himself in a dramatic and interesting way. Could he be a local actor, used to striking a pose without a mirror?
Having turned out of well, I imagine that the photos took too long to process and that the sitter was forced to leave the strip due to the imminent arrival of his train.
This is a standard sized strip of colour photobooth photos which measures 41 x 97 mm.
Found, Luna Park 08/09/1996
Another found photo from the 90’s. I find these pics extremely amusing. There is something of Frankenstein’s monster in the lobotomised head I have had to “stitch” back on and in the stunned-mullet, slow-brained look on the face of this sitter. One must say that he and his friend were not the brightest of individuals, having missed most of the flashes before sitting down to pose.
I never found the final photo that looks like it may have actually worked, but that was okay, for I had plenty of fun with the other remnants.
My Fotobooth Frankenstein
I have no idea where this set of pictures was discovered, what the date was, or even the country in which it was found . I’ve no idea if I myself retrieved it from oblivion, or if a friend found it for me. I can only imagine that these two cuties were extremely disappointed when they found they no longer had it.
Found, Luna Park, 08/09/1996
Today is the first time since 1996 that I have attempted to reconstruct this strip. Initially, I didn’t recognise these fragments as belonging together. I am surprised at how differently the pieces have aged. A possible reason for the vastly different tones, could be that some were discoloured by other items that were in the bin where they were found. I cringe at the thought.
So what happened here? This young couple entered the booth and snuggled up, looking at the camera, smiling as each flash went off. They waited excitedly for the photos to drop into the shoot. While still wet, they looked at them together and he agreed that there was at least one wonderful shot of her, but none of him that he could admire. She liked them all despite the off kilter framing. They couldn’t agree to disagree. Within five minutes he’d torn up the strip and binned it.
Our young lady returned later to retrieve the cast off images that she’d liked, for the most part not bothering to collect the images of him. She was still in a huff about the destruction of an, albeit flawed, memento.
Found 15/10/1997
This set of photos was found at Flinders Street Station on the 15th of October 1997. I was on my way to meet my school friend, Francis Flanagan. We went to see the film Chasing Amy. I have absolutely no memory of that film, whatsoever.
So who is this young woman and why was this set of pics chucked on the ground? We’ll probably never know who she was/is, yet we can tell a number of things about her and the circumstances under which she took these pictures. She definitely had a poor comprehension of our littering laws, for a start. She is certainly a beautiful girl, who had a certain idea of how she should look in a portrait.
There is a smidgen of a sleeve showing in the top two images. This suggests to me, that she was not there to get a set of fun shots. If she had been, her demeanor would be quite different and the person standing beside her would, most likely, have joined in.
Could it be that she was actually using this booth to get passport photos?? An outrageous idea to someone who sees these automata cameras as toys. If that indeed was the purpose of this sitting, then this dirty set of pictures, with roller marks obscuring parts of the face, would have been unusable. Another reason they could have been discarded is that the four identical portraits option was not chosen.
Obviously, I love it when these photos don’t work and they are rejected for whatever reason. Unfortunately, with these dip and dunk machine all but gone, the unexpected find has become rarer and rarer.
Found id pictures from a Flinders Street Station photobooth, January 13, 1998.
Luna Park 08/09/1996
When living in London, as my fascination with the products of automatic photography grew, I started to collect discarded photobooth photos. I have many to share but thought I’d choose a random one from Melbourne, to start with.
There used to be two old black and white, “dip and dunk”, chemical photobooths at Luna Park, a very old amusement park in the bay-side Melbourne suburb of St Kilda. Living only a short tram trip away, it was easy for me to pop in on a regular basis. Entry to the park has always been free, so it never cost me anything to scrounge around the bins and behind the booths, looking for jettisoned photographic ephemera, whilst taking a few snaps of my own for posterity.
Some days I would find complete undamaged strips, other days a few remaining remnants. I find these torn photos, melancholic and charming in their beaten up, unloved state. One can see why this pic didn’t meet the sitters’ standards, with the blank, black, blob of doom above them. Yet, I can see merit in the one picture that worked, enough to have made me treasure it, if I had been one of the subjects.
Photobooth Journal 