An Accidental Community Artist: The Making of the PhotoBooth Project

In looking over some of the abstracts that others practitioners have submitted to this publishing project, I see that generally they come from artists who are already working within community arts organizations preserving indigenous artforms, creating new forms or new places where the community can express itself, and the like. In contrast, I am an outsider, untrained, in fact unaware that theories of community art existed until I started reading the texts of the other invitees. I came to be a community artist, if in fact I really am that, in a completely different way. I am a community artist by accident and by temperament. And, in fact, I try very hard to disguise the perception that what I am doing is art. Its effectiveness, or whatever ability it has to be transformative, is increased by this disguise.

I am a community artist if that designation applies also to those who are committed to finding ways to reflect communities back to themselves so as to allow us to question our assumptions about who really makes up community. Is your community the 9-10 people you like to hang out with, plus the check-out woman and the guy that serves the coffee at your local café — or could you explore the rich mix of people that you have the potential to meet anew every day and through whom you can create richer networks of association?

And from there follows the whole LOCAL movement — or as fellow practitioner Patricia Shifferd says: “local as locus” — from locavores to credit unions to CSAs (community-supported agriculture.) None of this can happen unless we can enrich and strengthen the complexity of the community fabric we weave as we make some heartfelt attempt to move away from Empire and toward sustainable local economies, economic empowerment and independence from the Wal-Mart economy. All of these interests are the concerns that inform my PhotoBooth projects.

So, to start at the beginning, I have been a photographer for over 20 years. As far back as I can remember the human face has fascinated me. Throughout my adult life I have been trying to find ways to portray the many and varied faces I see every day. I’ve approached people with my camera, I've made portraits on cross-country trips, I’ve tried to photograph people surreptitiously, I’ve even mounted a camera to my head.

For years I’ve also been a fan of photobooth pictures. About four years ago, I realized that a portable studio in the form of a “Photobooth” might both allow me access to large numbers of people and also give sitters the privacy they needed for me to achieve my goals. So, my initial interest in building the photobooth was just to find a way to gather as large a sampling of people as possible.

I created a lightweight, collapsible and very portable studio, roughly 6' high, 4 1/2' wide and 6' deep. It weighs about 30 pounds. Subjects sit inside on a wooden box and I am on the outside with my camera sticking through a hole in the front of the booth. I give very little instruction, but I am always looking for something of visual interest. I love gesture, expression, relationship (the booth will hold two, three or sometimes even four people).

From the photographs I make, I create a wall-sized installation of the collected portraits. In terms of the actual shooting production, I generally create projects in communities where I have received an
invitation. A critical component is to have my production assistants be from the local community: those who inform passersby of the project as well as cajole passersby into participating, get them to sign in and make a mailing label, etc. This is not just a way to give local people participation in an art experience. Rather it is simply “protective coloration” for me. I am most often completely taken up with the actual photography, so that the experience of those who are photographed is that of engaging with members of their own community. These production assistants know the “local lingo,” body language, personal space and the like, so that they experience it as being approached and engaged by a local.

I see that the photobooth can function like a private sanctuary but in a public place. Surrounded by white walls and behind a curtain, subjects are unable to see even the photographer, although I see them through the camera. In this way, subjects can approach the moment with openness and curiosity and we see them in resulting portraits without their public mask. A much more revealing portrait is often possible. The gaze we encounter in these portraits is often direct and intimate, and we re-encounter our community — with the hint that perhaps this ungardedness is who we really are underneath the dross and complications of daily life.

Being able to show an individual and a community back to itself through a series of unguarded moments is what drives me to do these projects.

When I go into a community, I rarely have a clue as to who the heroes and villains are. I create an installation that is essentially a grid of portraits — the visual warp and weft of the fabric of that community — and in this context it seems harder to form quick judgments. The photobooth portraits often have a quality in which the sitter appears to be looking directly at the viewer and there is a sense of intimacy to the experience of another's gaze that we usually have only with those to whom we are very close. And we see everyone at the same scale in a visually democratic way. Viewers can directly gaze at the faces of fellow citizens and have a moment to reflect on their relationship to one another. I am interested in strengthening the ties of a community by showing the group back to itself in a direct and democratic fashion, with the hope that we might see each other in a fresh and less judgmental way. The installation functions as a place to meet one's neighbors as a town green might once have allowed, so as to share with others the gaze of the community.

For the last four years, I've been making trips around the country with my portable studio, making photographic portraits of different communities and, where possible, creating public installations of all the portraits made in that particular place. What I subsequently learned about my process came directly out of the work itself, and it took me a bit of time to recognize the process as it unfolded before me.

Here is a brief description of four projects I've done around the country:

Farley’s, San Francisco, California

My first attempt at using the PhotoBooth was to document the patrons of Farley's, a neighborhood café in San Francisco that I frequent on a daily basis. It has a wonderful, varied and faithful clientele. I set up the studio on the sidewalk and over four days during a three-month period I made more than 500 portraits. I realized during the editing of the images that I couldn’t rationalize making aesthetic, cultural or class judgments about my subjects in order to edit the final grouping down in size. I could, of course, choose from the 10 to 30 frames I took of each sitter. I never choose an image that I think will be unflattering, but I'm looking for those images that are revealing of personality, with a direct and intimate quality as possible. With this I learned the first principle of the project, that anyone who was photographed could not be excluded. Also, I consider the work to be collaborative. I have each participant fill out a form that includes a mailing label. In recognition of their collaboration, all who participate are mailed a free 5x7 print at a later date, or are invited to claim their portrait when the installation is removed.

The portraits for this installation, some as large as 24”x36”, were printed on rolls of paper 24" wide and 100' long and the café was literally wallpapered in order to include all who had been photographed.

I installed this first project in the café late on a Saturday night, and had some real anxiety about how covering every square inch of the café might be viewed by the patrons. Was this just an exercise in megalomania? 525 portraits? It was with some trepidation, then, that I mounted the steps the next Sunday morning, because the café was filled. As I entered, someone saw me and started to clap, and before I'd gotten to the counter, I had a standing ovation.

This was when I realized I had really hit one out of the park. Not because the portraits were so extraordinary (although I felt as if I was finally achieving what I'd been looking for for years), but they were so clearly compelling for my audience: It was about them, and their community mirrored back to them.

They saw it as about community, not about art. That was how I came to understand that what I was doing was not just collecting portraits. I had found a way for a community to see itself and its interconnectedness. And the installation brought many patrons, some of whom had been frequenting the café for years, together in conversations for the first time.

In many subsequent conversations, with easily hundreds of the more than 500 community members I photographed, it became clear that they saw this as an act of community, and that they were active participants and collaborators. My response to what I was doing came about from seeing my own muffled hunger for community echoed by their response to my work, which wasn't at all about me, but rather in a stealth kind of way, all about those who came to see the work. As I said above, the less they recognized it as Art, the more effective and sometimes even transformative it seemed to be.

In June of 2004, buoyed by the response I'd gotten from my first installation, I set out on a six-week journey across the United States in a VW Eurovan with the booth in a box on the top. During that six weeks I made over 1,500 portraits in towns like Putney, Vt.; Contoocook and Alstead, N.H.; Cambridge, Mass.; Troy, Pa.; and Douglas, Wy. I have subsequently done installations for HBO, Saks Fifth Avenue, The Governor's Office-California State House, The Claremont Museum, Claremont, California, and six installations in different neighborhoods of San Francisco. Upcoming projects include: University of California, Berkeley; a farmer's market in Baltimore, Md.; The Brattleboro Museum of Art, Brattleboro, Vt.; a private school in Santa Rosa, Calif., that is relocating to a low-income neighborhood; and a small neighborhood in San Francisco cut off from the rest of the city by a major freeway.

Putney Food Co-op, Putney, Vermont

Photobooth installation in Putney, Vermont, October 2005: 180 portraits of town residents taken in June 2004. The installation was directly across from the Putney Food Co-op, a social center for the town. Images were digitally printed on Tyvek and they withstood the “100-year storm” that occurred several days after the installation was completed. Several months later, when the installation was taken down, the images were given away to the subjects who participated. Click here to enlarge

In the summer of 2004, I started discussions with the manager of the Putney Co-op in Putney, Vt., about doing an installation with the town, having photographed there for several days the summer before on my cross-country trip. I was interested in doing an installation of the 180 portraits I had made, but the places suggested, like the town hall and the local community center, seemed out of the daily routine. I was coming to feel very strongly that for the projects to be effective, they had to be someplace frequented by the community in its daily activities, rather than a place apart. Someplace where they just happened upon the installation, with an element of surprise.

I mentioned at one point that all I really needed was a big wall. It was then that someone suggested that we should just build one. The co-op secured permission to erect a wall, 10’ high x 60’ long, on empty land directly across from the co-op entrance.

I returned to San Francisco, designed, laid out and printed the show in 24'x8’ strips. I then returned to Putney, where I directed a team in erecting a billboard-like structure. The images were printed on Tyvek©, the material that they print FedEx bags out of, and the strips were stapled to the billboard.

Silver City, N.M.

In June of 2005, I was invited to Silver City, N.M., a small ex-mining town in the high desert of southwestern New Mexico. The town has an amazing mix of people from all walks of life — miners and ranchers, immigrants from Latin America, a good-sized gay and lesbian population, doctors, lawyers, teachers and a great bunch of kids.

I spent several days there with the booth set up on the sidewalk and was offered an empty department store as a place to install the group of portraits. As I started to look at all the portraits on the computer monitor, I realized that there were some among the people I photographed who would never cross a threshold to see something they saw as "other," not about them, about “Art” — that made them objects rather than subjects. So, before I left, I mapped all the store windows so I could layout the project back in the studio and then install the prints directly behind the window glass rather than using the walls of the store as an art gallery. I returned to San Francisco, where I edited, laid out and printed the show. Three weeks later, I returned to do the installation. I lit the images from behind so that at night the windows glowed like a light box.

I became interested in what I see as a kind of narrative quality to these portraits. For me personally, this was revelatory. I came to see all I photographed as interesting and worthy of notice, in a way that makes each one more like a character in a great story.

Pancho Villa Taqueria, San Francisco

Back in San Francisco in May of 2006, I was able to complete one of the projects that had most
captured my imagination. The Pancho Villa Taqueria in the heart of the Mission district has three ingredients I most look for in doing an installation: a place that has a great cross-section of local people, is a gathering place for that community and has the space to display the portraits made there. That is was a simple taqueria made it all the more important to me. It was better than having a museum show because it meant the whole community would be able to see it very easily. And the 10'x54' blank wall along one side of the room meant I had all the space I needed to show all of the portraits.

Assessment and Responses

As an artist, I am not really interested in irony or critique. I consider my projects to be collaborations with the community. To the degree that these installations are art projects, it is the community's experience of the piece, and any changes of perception in that community that come about as a result, that are my goals. I hope the installations help us see more clearly our humanness and all that connects us rather than separates us.

How successful have the installations been in various communities? It's difficult for me to assess, as I am often there only for the installation and am gone a day or two later.

There is the very important ingredient of critical mass. That is to say: If the community sample comes from too geographically large an area, then the project represents too small a subset and people do not recognize the connections. The most successful projects have either been:

1. In small towns where a significant percent of the population know a fairly large group of the people portrayed, or
2. Where all members of a clearly defined group have been photographed, or
3. In a city environment, where a neighborhood is primarily locals as opposed to those who come to it from other parts of the city.

In making an assessment of how effective an installation is I look to comments I've been sent, or in one case, where I surveyed a group afterward. I also troll local community blogs to look for responses.

Here are a number of responses I've gathered:

From Putney, Vt.: 180 images printed on Tyvek, mounted on constructed plywood wall 10'x60'

"I have found myself going out of my way to drive by the Putney Co-op since the PhotoBooth photos have been installed there. I love how people gather in front of the photos and begin conversations about our community members … conversations that wouldn't have happened otherwise. As Christopher said to me yesterday morning, the installation creates a kind of common where people come together, talk, get to know one another better.”

"This morning I was having coffee in the Co-op and asked a familiar patron about her impression of the photo installation. She was delighted with it, as I was. And then the conversation meandered along about many of the people we knew in Putney, how they were doing, contributions that they make to our community. Young people, older people, traditional or alternative in their lifestyles."

“Thank you, Christopher Irion, for your amazing work in capturing and showing us who we are, and helping us more consciously appreciate one another.”

 “I just saw the PhotoBooth project in Putney and was moved to tears at the range of amazing faces. The warmth and good feeling these faces send out to viewer is not to be missed. What a gift to see these images with the fall foliage as a backdrop.”

“Thanks for the tip on the Irion page, the portraits are really wonderful, intriguing, they sort of have an intimate feel to them, looking straight at you, it’s like you get almost up close and personal with strangers, nice. What a great eye for personality he has.”

“Considering these are total strangers and he has only a few moments with them, and makes only ten or 15 exposures, what he does is extraordinary. The detail in the physical images, printed at maybe 16 x 24, and the subtle tones, just takes your breath away.”

Governor’s Office, California Statehouse, Sacramento, Calif.: 89 portraits mounted on eight 4’x8' panels

“Yesterday, when I was in the state capitol building for a meeting, I happened upon the portraits in the hallway outside the governor's office of the workforce representing a developmentally challenged population. I worked in the building for five years as a staffer, and was used to passing this sterile hallway just like always. FULL STOP! What an extraordinary display of humanity! I went from photo to photo, like pages in a book, looking into the faces, seeing so many different reflections of humanity in all its forms and emotions, the innocence, hope, pride, confusion, torment and all the rest of it. I found myself laughing, moved, and suddenly alive, like I was suddenly connected to what moves me deeply. Your vision and your accomplishment are a great gift to a building where its aliveness sends such a potent message. Thanks for what you've done.”

Claremont Museum of Art, Claremont, Calif.: 214 images mounted on constructed plywood wall in Museum Courtyard, 10’x75'

"The resulting portraits are remarkably beautiful and revealing. I'm impressed with what Irion is able to capture in a small, enclosed space. And so are the participants. Many tell him it's the best photo they've ever seen of themselves. No one is edited out. Once you walk into the booth, you know you're going to be part of a public art installation."

“Spend a few minutes taking in the photos and you can’t help but be fascinated, and moved, by the humanity on display. I'm not sure I can explain why, but I get misty-eyed when I see the portraits, and whenever I think of them, too. There's just vulnerability, a playfulness, a serenity to the people in these candid photos, and seeing so many of them in one place has a powerful, humbling impact.”

San Francisco, Calif.: Farley's café: 523 images printed on roll paper, push-pinned to wall in strips like wallpaper

Roger Hillyard of Farley's café in San Francisco — home of the first PhotoBooth project, completed in 2004 — says, "When the show was up, people would walk in the café and just stop. They'd look around in awe, their jaw would kind of drop, and then they'd break into a big smile.... [The installation] was so great and wonderful. It had a very warm feeling to it. It warmed everyone's heart and brought a sense of community."

HBO offices, New York City: 133 portraits shown in a common hallway/social space. Written answers culled from about 35 respondents:

Q: What effect, if any, do you think the project had on the group as a whole?

A: A very, very positive fun one. It was neat to go around and see everyone. Even the next day people would come to the installation and look around and comment on all the pictures. People from other departments also came to see it. It definitely represented community building.

A: I think the project helped people feel like they were part of the group. I don't know that I ever really felt that way before... and I saw pictures of people I didn't even know — or know that they were in my group.

Very positive. For days, people congregated by the wall and looked at and discussed the pictures. People I had never spoken to before passed me in the hallways and said, "I like your picture."

Q: Do you think the group was effectively portrayed by this project?

A: Yes, I thought as an entire mural; it was ironic where you placed certain people on the wall. You know us only by our photos, but somehow you lumped us creatively into certain areas that kind of define us. Somehow in some certain respects...we are so different, but yet so alike creatively. I loved it.

A: I thought you did a great job of capturing people and really making everyone look so unique.

A: The black-and-white aspect of the project took it to another level. The wall is a real conversation piece and has created much more interaction and reaction from everyone.

Q: Did you find that in looking at the portraits of fellow employees your perception of them was changed?

A: It was full of truth...some of the people's personalities, who I once assumed were quiet, really shined through. A lot of beauty & love showed through in a community filled with anxiety and tension and paranoia and stress and creative ripples and super-closeted freakazoids.

A: I saw sadness, vulnerability and all kinds of flickerings of emotion one might not normally find in the day-to-day people with their “guard face” up.

A: For some. It showed the "human" side of some of the higher-ups. When you're working...you tend see titles, not people. (V.P. of Blah-Blah wants xyz changed or Director of Ticky Tacky won't associate with titles below Manager. etc...) That kind of crap gets eliminated when you see them in these pictures. They're naked...so to speak.

Q: Did you like the portraits of others better? Or worse?

A: I think only mine and one other are awful. I think everyone else looks beautiful and handsome and amazing.

Q: Did anything you didn't expect come about because of the effect of the installation?

A: My girlfriend was one of the people you photographed. She and I have been together for over three-and-a-half years. In my mind, I see her in a particular, subjective way. Seeing her photograph on that wall allowed me to be reminded of how objectively beautiful she really is. Frankly, I was caught off guard.

A: I was sad to hear that someone was so upset that they cried. For me, the whole thing wasn't about me, it was about having the group reflected back at itself — almost as if you'd held up a mirror to us.

Q: Any other comments?

A: KILLER JOB...I THOUGHT YOU ROCKED IT. VERY COOL : )

This essay is part of the Community Arts Convening & Research Project, 2008, funded by a Nathan Cummings Foundation grant to the Maryland Institute College of Art. The essay was reviewed and selected by the project's Editorial Board: Ron Bechet, Xavier University of Louisiana; Lori Hager, University of Oregon; Marina Gutierrez, Cooper Union; Ken Krafchek, Maryland Institute College of Art; Sonia Mañjon, California College of the Arts; Amalia Mesa-Bains, California State University Monterey Bay; Paul Teruel, Columbia College Chicago; and Stephani Woodson, Arizona State University.

Christopher Irion is a photographer who lives in San Francisco, Calif., and Putney, Vt. He continues to work on Photobooth projects around the country. At the same time he is using his community building skills to design and build small-scale housing developments with a greater balance of living space to shared open space, while still within the confines of town centers that have access to culture and services. He is a graduate of Rhode Island School of Design.

Original CAN/API publication: August 2008