Photobooth:
A Biography
For almost a century chemical photobooths have occupied public spaces, giving people the opportunity to quickly take inexpensive, quality photos. In the last decade these machines have started to rapidly disappear, causing an eclectic group of individuals from around the world to come together and respond. Illustrator, writer and long-time photobooth lover, Meags Fitzgerald has chronicled the photobooth’s fortuitous history and the events which gave rise to the desperate need to save them. Having traveled in North America, Europe and Australia, she’s constructed a biography of the booth through the eyes of technicians, owners, collectors, artists and fanatics. In this ground-breaking book Fitzgerald struggles with her own relationship to these fleeting machines, while looking to the future.
Photobooth: A Biography can be purchased in bookstores across Canada and in selective stores in the USA and United Kingdom. Signed and inscribed copies can be purchased here. A digital version is available for iPad users through Sequential Publishing.
Conundrum Press, Graphic novel: Non-Fiction
ISBN 1-894994-82-5 / 978-1-894994-82-8
6.5 x 8.5 inches, 280 pages, B&W
Trade Paperback, $20, Released: May 2014
ACCLAIM for Photobooth: A Biography
Fitzgerald won the 2015 Doug Wright Spotlight Award, was nominated for the 2015 Joe Shuster Award in the Best Cartoonist Category, and received an honorable mention at the 2015 Expozine Awards for Best Book.
In July 2014, Fitzgerald was named one of CBC’s 2014 “Writers to Watch.” In 2015 she was voted Montreal's 4th Best Comic Artist by Cult MTL readers.
“Fitzgerald has created something that’s more than candid personal memoir, more than carefully researched cultural history — she’s created a work brimming with that rarest of things: love. That I should use such a word to explain a young woman’s feelings for photobooths certainly sounds improbable and maybe even a little crazy. And that’s precisely why this book is so wonderful.”
“Photobooth: A Biography is an impressive and ambitious project. A deep exploration of an unexpected topic that is in turn historical, journalistic, and personal.”
“Easily one of the best books in recent memory. Rarely has a creator depicted so masterfully — and, might I add, positively — the mindset and sheer love that goes into collecting. If you give this book a chance, and I hope you will, I imagine you’ll be surprised to find that not only is Photobooth exceptionally readable, but that it’s also one of the most intensely moving books to emerge this year.”
“Meags Fitzgerald’s Photobooth: A Biography has the admirable quality of being beautiful, experimental, accessible, educational and deeply personal all at the same time. The work is a thought provoking meditation on art, technology and history using the graphic novel form.”
“This is a must-read book for fans of graphic-genre narratives, photographers, pop-culture historians, scholars of human relationships to our technologies, and anyone who loves a good dip-n-dunk.”
“It’s surprising that something as commonly overlooked as a photobooth could be so lovingly rendered, but Fitzgerald’s images, from historical models in Montreal metro stations to still-active Tiki-themed booths in L.A. bars, testify to her love for the technology.”