Their digital cousins are okay, but Diane Smyth mourns the traditional photobooth
In Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Friedrich Nietzsche proposes the idea of the eternal return. Like a crazy Nordic Groundhog Day, time is cyclical, he suggests, and whatever has happened, will happen again.
Nietzsche admitted it's a 'horrifying and paralyzing' thought and anyone who's ever suffered a bad morning in the rush hour will no doubt agree. But Nietzsche also had a more positive spin, if you'll forgive the pun. Every now again, if you're a super special and lucky, you'll have a moment that's so good that you'll want to live it over and over.
Have you ever had such a moment? Maybe. Was it in a photobooth? I think not.
This, in a nutshell, is why the death of the traditional photobooth must be mourned. In the good old days you got four different shots of four different poses, in series that represented your own little strip of time. With the birth of the digital photobooth one moment recurrs four times, like some freak Andy Warhol print.
OK so digital booths allow you to preview your photographs and edit out the dross. But where's the fun in that? The frisson of excitement as you waited to see what God-awful photographs would drop into the out-tray has gone, overtaken by the control freakery of our image-obsessed society. Long aeroplane journeys just won't be the same without the opportunity to laugh at my travelling companions' funny passport photos.
And much as it hurts my vanity to admit it, I think I'll be the loser without my own funny photos too. I know what everyone else looks like, I want to see what I look like and I want to be prepared for the worse case scenario. If I look like a fool in three out of four shots of my earmuffs I'd rather know about it, not float along on a wave of fake optimism. Funny, honest, unrepeatable, the photos produced by traditional photobooths were just a little like life itself, whatever Nietzsche says.
Diane Smyth is the deputy editor of the British Journal of Photography
