The following was written by Mark Starmach for an undergraduate degree with the School of English, Media and Performing Arts at UNSW in 2010.
Logic of the Photo Booth: Screen cultures, performance and personhood
As a system of representation, the visual image is perhaps the most powerful mode of meaning making and perception in today’s society. With the induction of photography in the early 19thCentury, the ability to recreate vision without “human agency or intervention” meant that the image could be commoditised as a “permanent tangible object” (Wright 2008: 3). Alongside this though, the blossoming of portraiture and self portrait forms through photography, has also worked to detach and objectify the self as a similar permanent and tangible entity.
Additionally, through historical notions of the camera obscura as a judge’s chambers, photographs are granted a quasi-spiritual status within visual culture, in that the photorealistic is regarded as truth (Haraway 2008: 251). Under this logic of perception, self portraiture can also be considered the means of commoditising one’s own identity. For Dumit too, the circulation of ambiguous ‘brain images’ in generating notions of personhood within the public are significant in that by revealing private biology through public images, simple cultural truths about the human body are contested, undone and rewritten (2004: 12). Images are therefore powerful conveyers of communication.
Wright makes a distinction though between the types of knowledge which can be transmitted through the visual image, as direct and indirect (2008: ix). The former describes the information represented within the content of the image itself. However, echoing McLuhan, the latter refers to the information conveyed through the medium or container of the image. With photography increasingly framed by screens, this has vast implications for the indirect knowledge contemporary images forge. In the age of mobility, the role of self portraiture is now not so much the creation of permanence, but rather the fleeting, temporal, transmittable and mobile self.
In many ways screen interfaces, and their increasing ubiquitous presence in media and cultural ecologies, have become the tools for self-identification, definition, reiteration and moreover the continuation of 20th Century paradigms of individualism through mechanisms of visual culture.
This essay aims to consider how screen cultures objectify and mobilise the visual self in new social and cultural contexts of globalisation. With specific reference to self-portraiture and identity through photography, photo booths will be examined historically and culturally as objects within a third space which actively produce contemporary identities.
The emergence of the visual and the Western self
The genesis of photo booths is aligned very much with the genesis of early modern visual culture itself. With the first patent registered by Mathew Stiffens in 1889 and the first prototype unveiled during the World Fair of that year, the Exposition Universelle in Paris, by Monsieur Enjalbert1, the photo booth was dwarfed against a myriad of exhibitions and modern architectural feats such as the Galerie des Machines and the Eiffel Tower. However, this does not render its conception at this event trivial. Respectively, when they were built, the Gallery and Tower were the most significant structures in terms of innovation, technology, expression and visual status. Measuring 364 feet and covering 900,000 square feet, with seemingly gravity-defying steel arches, the Galerie des Machines was designed as the largest and most daring building of its time (Stamper, Mark 1993: 127-130). As the epicentre of the Exposition Universelle, this structure housed an impressive myriad of prototypes, social elites, inventors and investors. Similarly, standing 106 storeys, Gustav Eifell’s tower became a symbol for spectators, an icon of French industry and empire (Young 2008: 8). Usurping the Cathedral of Notre Dame as the highest vantage point of the city, and therefore as the most distinguishable landmark in Paris, the Eiffel Tower’s mythology has been enabled through its ‘reprintability’ and universality as a symbol for French national identity; simply put, it transfers easier (2008: 10).
This is to say, the Eiffel Tower was constructed with the intent of being a transmittable image for Paris and the Western notions of progress and nationhood that it stands for. Perhaps in contrast though, the display of live dancers from the Dutch colony of Java was a seminal attraction of the event. Located under the same visual landscape as the Galarie des Machines and the Eiffel Tower, early cinema and photography, this display of European imperialism and racial hierarchy renders the 1889 Exhibition Universelle as one in which the eye was privileged as the central organ of Western spectatorship, consumption and progress. This is the birth of modern visual culture in that the viewer is less bound to time and space, but rather free to drift between contexts and consume juxtaposing images, foreshadowing the media image saturated world we live in today (Young 2008: 33). It is in this context, the genesis of visual mobility, the mass adornment of the public spectacle, the empowerment of the Western viewer, and the delinearisation of image assemblages in which the photo booth was first conceived.
The next stage of the photo booth’s development takes place on the bustling sidewalks of Jazz age New York. In drifting westward over the Atlantic2, the design of the photo booth was modernised and mainstreamed by Anatol Josepho in 19253, becoming massively popular amongst moviegoers and Broadway musical lovers alike. As the first media city (McQuire 2008: 120), New York cradled the image as the engine for Western consumption in the early 20th Century. Tye 1998 notes that by this time, the father of public relations Eddie Bernays, was at the height of his power. In drawing on the Freudian theories of the subconscious and the Ego, Bernays was able to use the power of desire coupled with the allure of the visual image to effectively transform the American market from a ‘needs’ to ‘wants’ culture (Curtis et al 2002). Birthing Debord’s society of the spectacle4, Bernays was able to turn the gaze of the hedonistic consumer culture of the 1920s and 30s inward toward the self. The indirect knowledge and logic of photo booth privileges not only the Western viewer, but also the consumer.
As the eyes of the world moved again westward toward Hollywood, the fascination and infatuation of the Western consumer with celebrity and glamour was now able to be externalised through social technologies and cultural signifiers (Putnam 1993: 47), such as fashion and vehicles, and their trajectories aimed at orbiting a centralised sense of self. As Finkelstein writes inThe Art of Self Invention, the humanist traditions of Western culture continually “place the individual at the centre of science, history and the arts, and made the world into a creation of mind” (2007: 134). In this way, Finkelstein states that identity operates as a social device, “consciousness, memory, sentiment and human will” very much marry “the fate of society with that of singular individuals” (2007: 134). And so with this understanding of Western visual culture, the self portrait, and how the self is transferred, serves an important social function. Endowed with these paradigms, the photo booth has become a mythologised item within public culture. During the 1960s, popular artist Andy Warhol first experimented with photo booths as a means of transmitting the self in a highly unnatural and contextualised object. Exhibited in 1989, Photo Booth, illustrates Warhol’s engagement with the photo booth as a pivotal intersection of mass entertainment and private self-contemplation5. For Warhol, the nature of the photo booth encumbered ideas of mechanism and Polaroid, self worship, exhibitionism and instant celebrity, detachment and passivity. Having empowered Western viewership, consumption and celebrity, this marks the end of the photo booth’s journey across the Western world as instead it embarks toward the East.
And so in contemporary times, as the photo booth moves once more westward across the Pacific toward Japan, East Asia and Oceania, new ideologies and mythologies are attached to it. To detour from the photo booth’s cultural journey for a moment, in Sydney’s Capitol Square, wedged between Chinatown and Capitol Theatre, there lies a whole mezzanine devoted to rows and rows of Japanese photo sticker booths. Entering the complex, the senses are overwhelmed. From the outside the photo booths sit staunchly, big white machines awkwardly packed into this tight space. Decorated with bright pastel colours, blinking lights, photographs of smiling Japanese models and cute manga characters, each emits a floral scent and an ‘ice cream truck’ tune. Inside, each machine houses a cushioned bench against a single-colour curtained background. In front of it is a giant touch display screen, able to detect and enhance smiles, add captions, decorations, anime style illustrations and digitally alter the background. After taking pictures, a significant portion of time is devoted to choosing, optimising and customising the photographs before finally printing them as stickers. Given the time of day, crowds of young schoolgirls can be seen cramming into a single machine, young couples stroll hand in hand to various booths and families bunch together so as not to lose each other in the crowd. Both from the exterior and interior, aesthetically and socially, these photo booths are designed as machines of happiness.
When one enters these photo booths they are teleported into another world; whether a nostalgic world of childhood, smiles and laughter, a slice of gritty downtown Tokyo, or a glamorous theatre of pose, celebrity and exhibition. In many ways the activities which surround photo booths are inherently intimate and bonding; girlfriends and boyfriends, friendship and family. The ability for these photo booths to transform the public space of the mezzanine into private, secluded and self-expressive sanctions is quite powerful. And so, whilst appearing as an orientalising homage to Japanese popular culture (and Japanophilia in general), what is taking place here each weeknight, particularly amongst participants of the broader East Asian diaspora, is quite an interesting exercise in cultural identification and the performative manufacture of the contemporary self.
‘Purikura’, the mobile and the making of self
In its leap across the Pacific, the Japanese have reinvented the contemporary photo booth. Now affixed with screens, customisable annotation and the final product as stickers (not a photostrip), each new technology endows the photo booth further with new cultural meanings and implications. In awe of not only Western consumption, but also Western individualism, the Japanese subculture of Purikura, popular amongst school-aged girls, has emerged, the photo booth placed at the centre of their doctrine. Similar to Gyaru and Yanquee subcultures, which see the hyperbolic appropriation of California gal and greaser cultures respectively, Purikura exaggerates self obsession through photography. Translating as ‘print club’, purikura groups are highly skilled photo booth users, marvelling themselves on their skills to pose, perform and generate elaborate portraits. Most Japanese girls engage in purikura, seldom done alone (Kurita 1999: 153-166), as it has become a social institution and norm. In The Social Uses of Purikura, a research paper undertaken by Daisuke Okabe et al, it was found that the screens of the photo booth and the mobile phone were central to purikura operations of visual communication, dissemination and identity (Okabe 2006: 1).
The screens within purikura booths enable the photographing and modding of one’s self. According to the interviewed subjects of Okabe 2006, this was a highly ritualised process, done for pleasure and commemoration of a public outing with friends (2006: 2). Afterward, in the “graffiti corner”, the group is able to digitally customise their photos, with various stamps, handwritten text, flowers, stars and hearts. In this way, the visual image is once again commoditised, however the touch display screen offers a new dynamic of expressionism and individualism to the image. In this way, the screen can encode more explicitly, memory and self into the portrait. After the photos are ‘modded’ in this way, the group will exit the booth and print the photos onto a sticky adhesive surface, thus producing the image as a tangible archive of both identity and memory. Okabe makes the important distinction that “unlike handheld photography, purikura photos enable people to easily take photos of every member assembled” (2006: 4) and dually that whether through blogging, mobile phones or purikura albums, these images are intended for circulation and transmission. In this way, purikura booths echo the visual communicative logic first exhibited in Paris 1889, that of disconnection of the eye with time and space, continuing Western ideals of the individual, celebrity and performance, but more importantly introducing the Eastern notion of transmission and mobility.
In Approaching the Mobile Culture of East Asia, professor Jaz Hee-jeong Choi contextualises the use of mobile media in East Asia as a tool of sociality, productivity and cultural identity (2007: 5-9). Focusing on Korea, China and Japan as collective cultures, Choi emphasises the significance of transmissional communication by drawing on three cultural characteristics running throughout these respective societies. The first is a polychromic perception of time, which sees the “harmonious maintenance of selective relationships valued over prompt time management” (Choi 2007: 10). Because of this East Asian groups manage much more closely a broader social network than their Western counterparts, and so the need for mobility between the network is pivotal in maintaining face and reputation. Secondly, Choi draws on Toomey and Kuroi’s term of ‘facework’ to stress the importance of managing one’s face in the public and private eye (2007: 12-13). Thirdly, Choi identifies that the self is defined interdependently. In a Hofstedian interdependent culture, “the self is primarily formed and sustained by its social environment” (2007: 11). Raquel Hill echoes this in noting Japan’s young mobile generation. In Japanese society, the mobile phone has moved from a business tool to a youth icon, “something which has a cultural significance beyond any particular qualities it might have” (2003: 179). In essence, the mobile phone increasingly constitutes and embodies the East Asian self. In this way, mobile media in East Asian cultures enable manageability and sustainability of one’s identity in ways which benefit and empower individuals in both business and social ventures. In light of globalisation, mobility has increasingly become the tool through which to define oneself.
The visual, the mobile and the self in liquid modernity
For Polish sociologist Zygmunt Bauman, visual and mobile cultures, and their ability to form a sense of self, are inherently linked (2000), in that the egocentric logic of visual culture is extended through the logic of mobile ones. Akin to Harraway, Bauman explores how modern identity is never a complete entity, but rather empowered through entanglement and flexibility, the ability “to disengage and to be elsewhere” (2000: 120). Through what Bauman dubs as ‘liquid modernity’, the stability and solidity between human interconnections have become liquefied and fluid over global time and space (Burkitt 2008: 173-174). For Bauman this poses a contradiction for “self-made identities which must be solid enough to be acknowledged as such and yet flexible enough not to bar freedom of future movements in the constantly changing, volatile circumstances [of liquid modernity]” (2000: 49-50).
Power is robbed from those who are static and unchanging, and instead, in the context of light capitalism (both organisationally and individually) given to those with the ability to move between and adapt to different social and cultural theatres. To illustrate this, Bauman uses the example of the mobile phone as a device to switch between and connect to another social group. Because of this mobile phones allow us to imagine ourselves as moving communal points of reference (Bauman 2004), giving our identity the appearance of stability when it is actually dynamic and fluid; our worlds not only orbit around us, but move with us as well. This places notions of mobility at the core of the contemporary self. It then comes at no surprise that the transmissive, fluid export nature of the East Asian economy is overtaking America’s, for the logic of East Asian cultures as interdependent and mobile (and indeed of purikura social practices) fits more contingently with the logic of identity under Bauman’s fluid modernity.
Historically and culturally, photo booths and more broadly photography, have empowered Western viewership, consumption and celebrity. In the global context of this the 21st Century, photography is more fluid than ever. With advents of digital photography, photo and video sharing sites and purika photo booths, the art of photography as a means to define the self has taken on the characteristics of transmittability and fluidity, as it is now framed by screens and mediums. This is to say, that through the gradual objectification of the contemporary self through photography, Western nobility and Eastern mobility have merged and wedded. Therefore, contemporary screen ecologies enable us to not only see ourselves, but also mobilise and transmit ourselves to others. For in liquid modernity it is through mobility that we as individuals are empowered.
Notes
1, 3, 5 This is derived from archived information available at www.photobooth.net
2 This idea of power drifting constantly westward was borrowed from Jacques Attali’s book “A Brief History of the Future” to describe how the merchantile order and trade has historically moved around the globe.
4 Guy Debord first developed the idea of ‘the society of the spectacle’ in his 1967 title of the same name. In this he explained contemporary consumer culture and commodity fetishism.
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By Mark Starmach 2010
