Several noteworthy facts concerning the photobooth located in Playland, an arcade, positioned in the heart of Manhattan’s Times Square, itself an arcade: it costs $1.50 (quarters only) for a strip of four images; individual shots are taken at four-second intervals, during which time the sitter poses a self or what that person or someone else might believe is one. There is no contrast control. The phrase “Smile and Relax” is permanently stenciled under the camera proper. The language dictates a personage; the sitter becomes one who “smiles” and “relaxes” before a photographer who does not exist.
Andy Warhol’s photobooth portraits have almost nothing to do with the various subjects being depicted. What these photographs do suggest is what gesticulating—smiling and relaxing—into the void looks like. The sitters’ desire to fill the void with personality, imagination, activity, has everything to do with our general inability to leave ourselves alone, to avoid representing anything. (See Warhol’s success in doing this for himself; see Warhol’s interest in others whose interest is not in doing this for themselves themselves.) It is interesting to differentiate, in the one- or two-hundred-odd images here, between those whom Warhol coaxed into taking the cheap shot for posterity (Ethel Scull, for example, whose photobooth portraits were incorporated by Warhol into his masterwork, Ethel Scull 36 Times, 1963), and those whom Warhol had nothing to do with at all (the “unidentified” black high school student who projects no imagination, no spectacle into the void). The latter’s mug shot by the absent photographer is essentially how he is viewed by Big Brother. Why should he smile and relax, or give anything to nothing? No Warholian influence on that black boy here. Since he was obviously not an object choice for Warhol, not being representative of power or money or Diana Ross or anything Warhol himself would have wanted to be, his image, of the many others seen here, states the obvious: remove Warhol (as name, as icon, as influence) from the photobooth and see what the apparatus produces—crumbling images very few people keep or remember, and the knowledge that the cheap shot taken of ourselves is the most we can ever hope for and all some people need.
—Hilton Als
