Behind the Curtain

A student-curated exhibition reveals the art of the photo booth.

After the first working photo booth debuted on Broadway in New York City in 1925, they began to pop up all over the place—in train and bus stations, stores, arcades, amusement parks and on the street. Anyone from any walk of life could step inside. It was a partnership between human and machine; no photographer told subjects how to hold their heads or where to place their arms or whether to smile. In this intimate space, they could do anything; they could scream, cry, kiss, make silly faces.

For a century now, this environment of accessibility, freedom and privacy has produced countless keepsake squares of memorable moments, but also photos for driver’s licenses and passports, for work and school IDs, and for posterity in yearbooks, newspapers and the like. The photos are a declaration: “I was here.” These quick and easy snapshots might not sound like art, but about two dozen Conn students know better.

This fall, students taking “Perspectives on Photography” with Lucy C. McDannel ’22 Professor of Art History and Anthropology Christopher Steiner and Associate Professor of Art History Karen Gonzalez Rice worked for over a month with 2024 Krane Art History Guest Residents Brian Wallis and Näkki Goranin to interpret and curate Behind the Curtain, a Shain Library exhibit that showcased “a seldom seen view of one of the most prolific forms of vernacular photography—small photo booth portraits that reveal poignant moments of self-expression.”

Wallis, who is executive director of The Center for Photography at Woodstock in Kingston, New York, and was deputy director and chief curator at the International Center of Photography (ICP) in New York City from 2000 to 2015, and Goranin, a Vermont photographer and writer who owns the more than 100 of the photo booth portraits, self-portraits and related ephemera featured in Behind the Curtain, are the second pair of distinguished scholars and collectors to be selected for participation in the annual Krane Art History Guest Residency Program, which began in 2023 and is supported by a gift from Trustee Jonathan Krane ’90.

“The program is really revolutionary,” Wallis said, “and everyone who is engaged with it as student curators or as visitors is really quite lucky, because there isn’t anything else like this in the world—especially this curatorial program that’s focusing on vernacular photography.”

At the exhibition opening in November, a few hundred people, including students, faculty, staff and the Krane residents, enjoyed a rented photo booth in Shain foyer. In the Chu Room, Wallis gave the keynote lecture, “What is Vernacular Photography?” About 99% of all photos fall into this category, he said. “Vernacular photography is all those photographs that we have, that we cherish, that we compile in our phones and in our photo albums and in shoe boxes. … It is the people’s photography.”

In fact, the Museum of Modern Art, which Wallis said previously “shunned” vernacular photography, has now embraced it and defines it as “an umbrella term used to distinguish fine art photographs from those made for a huge range of purposes, including commercial, scientific, forensic, governmental and personal.”

Vernacular photos may be considered ordinary, but Steiner hopes his students will continue to see what makes them special.

“By introducing our students to such distinguished scholars and leaders in their field, it is our hope that students will recognize the importance of photography and photo collecting in the study of art history, and in the social construction of contemporary identities,” he said.