My grandmother’s expressions range from laughter at the exaggerated faces I’m making to confusion. I had a finished Ring Pop on my finger, a small symbol of the time the photos were taken, in the mid-’90s. In one photo strip, around age four, I pose with my grandma in three of the frames and then disappear in the last. The brief window of trepidation between each photo, of trying to sense what the person next to me would do, became a dance. Our bodies would be pressed together, fighting for space on the small metal stool.
If taking photos with someone else, the intimacy increased.
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The lens offered a rare objectivity, an authenticity free from anyone else’s perspective-a true self-portrait. The lack of photographer meant I had the agency to be the subject without the gaze of anyone else, the insentient lens of the machine making way for infinite ways of seeing myself. This took place two more times, at which point I’d step back out into the world and wait for whatever magic took place within the guts of the machine to develop my photos. After the first photo was taken, there would be a frenzied rearrangement before the next flash went off. I’d insert my money and eagerly look into the automatic lens. Other times, it was planned as a way to capture a new friendship, or take an ID photo. I’d come across a booth in a mall or subway stop and decide to enter into the tiny box, where a worn curtain was the only thing protecting the intimate experience from the gaze of the public. Sometimes the act of sitting for a portrait was spontaneous.
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READ: ‘Xena: Warrior Princess’ taught me how to be a powerful woman My memories of taking the photos are dim, but the physical objects remain. In the first frame, I put on a compulsory smile, and then comes an abundance of giddiness-tongue out, hands cupping my face. I have another from when I was 12, wearing a bright orange T-shirt. I have a strip from when I was less than a year old, sitting on my mother’s lap, my face dazed, hers smiling wide. Silliness, blank stares and puppy love have all been captured on two-by-six-inch strips of photos. Photo booths have been witness to the timeline of my life: from infancy to childhood, from early adolescence to adulthood. writes to inform us this booth is no longer here. When I searched for analog booths in my hometown of Toronto, they were all listed with similar addendums: “UPDATE June 16, 2014-Another sad day in photobooth-land. A fan of the experience as a child, I decided to return to have my photograph taken in my late twenties. The digital database tracks a dying culture, listing coin-operated cameras housed within slim compartments around the world as they slowly become extinct. From left: The author at around age 10 as a baby with her boyfriend last summer at a booth in NYC with her mother in August 1997 (Courtesy of Tatum Dooley)
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