Andy Warhol, Bobby Short, 1963
The abridged press release that follows below (the full version
can be read Here) announces and describes the new exhibition at Vienna's Kunst Haus: "Photo Booth Art: The
Aesthetics behind the Curtain, from the Surrealists to Rainer and Warhol."
It's a neat idea for a show and I'm sure I'd love to see it, although I think the write-up verges into overseriousness
and aesthetic piety.
For me, photo booths mainly recall innocent wild fun with
friends, free and young living in an unhinged period, thinking we were looking good, completely
unmindful of death. The Vietnam War
notwithstanding, death literally meant nothing to us.
The exhibition pictures included here, except for the two
bracketing 1963 Andy Warhol portraits of Bobby Short, reflect this. While
the Warhol pictures are stately, timeless and even elegiac (like votive icons one might find at a candle-lit saint's altar), the 1929 Photomaton images of the Surrealists and their girlfriends are the most playful and naturally spontaneous images of these famous personnages I have ever seen. Salvador Dali and
Gala look superbly and naturally in love; fearsome
André
Breton,
auto-serial-photographed with Suzanne Muzard, seems
positively cuddly.
Yves Tanguy alone seems
to be working out kinks I suspected, but never
knew for certain, existed. God bless him and his beautiful, silent, intense art.
Vienna. If only I could travel
there tomorrow (and buy a new loden coat).......I surely
would.
Suzanne Muzard and dog, Photomaton portrait, 1929
"VIENNA.-
The little photographs that come out of photo booths have been a source of fascination ever since their very early
days in the 1920s. This is related both to the fact that one such little
photostrip can preserve a personal remembrance in condensed form and also to the often ambiguous
ways in which a photo booth can be used to play with one’s own identity. Analogue photo
booths, which work on the basis of photochemistry, became a dying species in the
1990s and disappeared from the urban landscape. They were replaced
by digital
successors designed to produce biometric passport photos. In recent years, however, analogue photo
booths have seen something of a Renaissance, and have now become cult objects.
Suzanne Muzard (l) and with André Breton (r), Photomaton portrait, 1929
When the first booths produced by the Photomaton company appeared in Paris in 1928, artists, too, were fascinated by the
possibility of obtaining automated self-portraits
within minutes for very little money. The
Surrealists were the first to recognise the artistic potential of photo booths.
Many other artists were to follow, for example Cindy Sherman, Arnulf Rainer,
Andy Warhol and Thomas Ruff. Behind the curtain, a
photo booth is an intimate place; yet, paradoxically, photo booths are found
mainly in public spaces where large numbers of people come and go: train stations, underground stations, shopping centres – and,
most recently, also venues of the arts and culture.
Gala Eluard and Salvador Dali, Photomaton
portrait, 1929
The fact that these machines, with their strictly regulated modus
operandi – four photographs taken at intervals of seven seconds each – were the only witnesses of
what went on behind the curtain captured the artists’ curiosity. They began to
play with the automatic function or attempted to get the maximum narrative
potential out of the photo series. Actually, the
photo booth was designed for the purpose of producing photos for the official
authentication of a person’s identity. Consequently, the idea of also using this machine
to illuminate and question one’s own
identity, to play with that identity or even reconstruct it, was – and is –
particularly intriguing.
Yves Tanguy, Photomaton portrait,
1929
With more than 300 works by about 60 international artists, the
exhibition “Photo Booth Art” introduces us to the world
of the “aesthetics behind the curtain”, which range from the photo booth’s
“original” function through artistic ways of playing with identities to the
telling of short stories or
the creation of individual worlds."
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