Revolt in the photo booth: how a boring gadget can make author photos | Culture

Can a photo booth be honest? Can we attribute a moral and aesthetic perspective to a booth that is used to automatically take photographs?

The artistic couple Ampparito and Irene Luna have turned into authors of a device designed to create boredom, to discipline faces. For four years they have gone to hundreds of photo booths in Spain and with a technical trick—a trapezoidal mirror that they placed in front of the machine’s camera—they have diverted their photographic shot outwards, portraying, instead of faces, anodyne spaces around the anodyne artifact. The result is an accidental portrait of Spain: an exercise in anti-landscaping, an anti-postcard series.

“The spaces where the photo booths are placed are chosen for practical reasons. Next to a police station, in a shopping center, on a corner where they won’t be in the way… It is an object designed with a notion of economic maximization. It lacks aesthetic criteria and there we find a certain form of photographic honesty,” explains Ampparito, the artistic firm of Ignacio Nevado, in the OTR exhibition hall, in Madrid, where the project is exhibited for the first time. Photo-in-photobooth.

For Luna, working with the non-aesthetic look of the photo booth is “liberating.” Talk about creative “relaxation.” The cabin removes them from the artistic mandate of the beautiful or the original, from the weight of authorship. In a text about their work they write: “It starts from the idea of ​​freeing this popular photographic box from its bureaucratic condemnation: ID portraits.” One might add that, in turn, the box, with its productive simplicity, frees them from creative anxiety.

It also releases questions about the meaning-value of the image and photography. Among the 166 photo booth reveals that they exhibit (of the 700 that make up the project archive) there are shots that can be considered photography and shots that could only be considered simple images, but it happens that both have been taken by the same author, the photo booth, and they are also the result of the moment: of what was happening around the device at the moment they pressed the button. Luna and Ampparito tried to execute the operation neutrally, without paying attention to whether something special was happening.

So one of the conceptual attractions of Photo-in-photobooth is that as you see one shot after another, arranged along a thin shelf running around the entire space of the room, the distinction between photography and image, between the representation of reality and its technical record, becomes blurred. “We have placed them in a continuous line so that no image has more prominence than another. They are all equally important. For example: one that is a photon and another that is shit, have the same value in the work,” explains Luna.

The artist Elsa Paricio and the owner of OTR., the collector José Trujillo, have collaborated in the montage, who among other things highlights the aesthetic diversity in the set of photos: he points out one of some falleras that were next to a photo booth in Valencia and another , of geometric austerity, of green tiles. Two innocent photo booth shots that are two artistic genres: costumbrismo and minimalism.

OTR. It is a unique room. Opened in 2008 and with a reputation as a space with its own criteria, and good judgment, it usually holds only two exhibitions a year without commercial purposes. They open them on a limited number of dates, but with the presence of the artists and the owner to talk in depth about the works. Next time you can visit Photo-in-photobooth in ORT. It is this Friday, May 10, from seven to nine in the afternoon. Trujillo jokes that they open “when it comes out of our occiput.” He also regrets that his space does not usually appear in the press: “They tell us that we always have it closed.”

Nevado and Luna are 32 and 31 years old, respectively. They are children of the current digital time, in which the capture, accumulation and reproducibility of the image has become infinite, calling into question the very possibility of photography as a finite and original—human—representation of reality, as a art. The photo booth, a machine without intelligence, almost human because it is so primary, has helped them carry out their tender and sagacious poetic-conceptual gesture, their just photographic revolt. With this project, Luna and Nevado defend a utopia: that photography is still possible.