Recently Daniel and I visited Michael Williams & Melissa Brown’s Time Booth. It’s an installation that recontextualizes the traditional photo booth by turning it into a performative space. Props, costumes, and backdrops are provided, as well as scrapbooks of storyboards to suggest the kinds of narratives (or non-narratives) which can be told in the space of the six frames of the photo booth prints. It turns out that the storyboards were key in helping participants conceptualize what they could do with the random props strewn about the gallery.

The sense of performativity is significantly heightened by the timing of the booth itself - once you start taking photos, there’s only about fifteen seconds to reset between shots, making for some hurried scene changes. Additionally, the scenes must be constructed out of order, as the booth took photos from top to bottom, but right to left, which is counter to the way that most western audiences would read them. This nonlinearity of performance, a constraint of the photo booth itself, actually underscores the performativity by drawing parallels to a film shoot.

There is a large barrier of entry that begins to break down once the audience witnesses other participants engaging with the booth. Overall the installation succeeds in encouraging participants to use the photo booth as a narrative tool, and to consider the stories they are telling in their photos. In the end it doesn’t wind up being hugely compelling as a performance, but the photos themselves are entertaining enough as artifacts.