Journaling with Vintage Photobooth Photos

All the people close to me know how much I love vintage photobooths and know that when we come across one, that they will have to sit and pose with me (and sit and wait as I pose by myself for a strip as well!).

I have ones going back to when I was in high school, but started to really seek them out again as an adult about 10 years ago. My fridge is covered with vintage photobooth strips with friends, but I also use them in my journals.

I keep an agenda journal (more on that in the future), and whenever I encounter a vintage photobooth I note them, as shown in the spread below:

I always scan the strips at a high resolution (at least 400 dpi) so if I wish to have them reprinted larger I can. In the journal below I created an insert for my Passport Size Travelers Notebook using a larger image from a vintage photobooth strip. I cut myself out, and made a subpage to journal about what goes on in my head.

Another journal I like to create is what I call a #reverb journal, where I do a prompt a day for the month of December recapping the year and setting intentions for the year to follow. Day five’s question is 5 things I don’t want to forget, and for 2018, below, I did the 5 trips that I went on that resulted in using a vintage photobooth and used one photo from each (with more on the front page).

Below is another spread from another year’s #reverb journal. Day 15 asks what was your favorite photo taken of yourself (or by you) this year.

I love to create travel journals, and for my recent trip to London this past summer, we stayed in a hotel that had a vintage photobooth in the lobby, so I made sure we took a strip every day and used them with each days journaling as shown below.

I also tend to use them in the cover pages of my journals where I put my contact information in case the journal gets lost and found. Below are several examples from over the years.

One of my closest friends has three children, and I have done the Flat Stanley Project for all three of them. The last was in 2018, and I brought Flat Stanley (named Flat Sofia) to a vintage photobooth to take a photo strip of the two of us to use in the journal I created for the project (below).

Each photobooth I encounter is different, and the exposure of the photos is different as well. You can see how excited I get when I find one in the photos below.

I started a new instagram, @4poses that documents the different vintage photobooths I find, the location and date, and photos of the booth and the strips. I use photbooth.net website to search for vintage photobooths across not only the country, but the globe.

One last thing, I have a system to store them that I wanted to share as well. I always write the date and location on the back of each strip, and then I use an Ali Edwards 3×8 Chipboard Album and 3×8 one pocket inserts to hold them in chronological order.

Let me know if you share a love for vintage photobooths and/or know of any I need to visit!