Machines

This photobooth strip records a half-minute standoff between a photobooth lens, which couldn’t move, and a photobooth subject who didn’t. It’s not easy to judge what (if anything) this unsmiling man was trying to achieve—whether he knew he would be sticking out of the frame at the top, or why he refused to vary the four shots. But by being so stubborn he succeeded in making us conscious of the unwavering impersonality of the booth’s operation; and by effacing his individuality he might almost have been mocking the booth’s own facelessness. His parody, witting or not, gets its edge from the obvious fact that he was a person, with freedoms he wasn’t using and character he didn’t display. A photobooth was a machine: impersonal by definition. The photos it took (unfortunately also called photobooths) were further impersonal in that, in their technical aspects, they were beyond anyone’s control. In contrast to what you could do in them, there was nothing you could do to them, and often enough something needed doing. The machine didn’t follow subjects who moved off-center or out of frame, it didn’t refocus to take account of subjects who leaned toward the lens, and there was no way to adjust the lighting, the shutter speed, or anything else. The interplay between the personal and the impersonal, the movable and the immovable—between what you could do and what was done for you—is part of what makes photobooth portraits interesting. You could control—or at least adjust—a snapshot camera in ways you couldn’t control or adjust a photobooth camera, but the cold mechanics of the process wound up being much the same. You “took” a photobooth by putting in your money and waiting in front of the lens; you could press the button of your snapshot camera when you wanted to, but that was really just an equivalent (if much faster) trigger. You could point a snapshot camera, but since your aim would not be perfect, the subject didn’t necessarily hold still, and you might not have been that interested in a “good shot” anyway, error would creep in—something that wasn’t you would influence the picture. The same went for the other ways of adjusting the mechanism and meddling with its operation, which varied from camera to camera. Snapshots are full of error—not just mistakes, but inaccuracy and defects that were allowed to supervene. Booths did get out of whack and break down, and their repertoire could not have been smaller, but your average photobooth portrait was technically superior to your average snapshot. The part of a photobooth shot or strip that wasn’t created by the user’s own volition was executed by a standard and relatively faultless mechanism that protected the users from themselves: the technical standards of photobooths were higher than those of snapshots not only because there was nothing to adjust, but because there was nothing to do other than pose. The booth contained its own lab and no one ever dealt with film. So that took care of dust, scratches, fingerprints, and probably double exposures and development problems. For the person who used it, the camera effectively existed only as a lens. A photobooth couldn’t be controlled at all; a snapshot was poorly controlled. As control went down, impersonal forces stepped in to do what had to be done. The impersonality of a photobooth portrait—its lack of authorship, particularly artistic authorship—is directly analogous to the impersonality of a snapshot; this similarity, along with the similarity in size and general purpose, is what lets collectors feel photobooths are in the same category as snapshots even though a photobooth camera was not a snapshot camera. In both cases the picture was shaped not by an artist or even by a person, but by a thing—either a mechanism registered with the Patent Office or one we might prefer to call luck or fate. The latter is much the sloppier, and its output is varied. That is the point of interest in snapshots. With photobooths, the mechanism was more reliable, though it was inflexible and couldn’t cope with a subject who didn’t cooperate; against that background the faces varied, and one in a million would be astonishing. Either way, we are looking for something that went wrong, or miraculously right. We are hoping to run across a statistically unlikely but pleasing deviation from an implicit norm.