Picture-it!: "One dime - one minute - one picture"

On September 17, 1889 the Frenchman Ernest Enjalbert applied at the Kaiserliches Patentamt [Royal Office of Patent] in Berlin for a copyright for a photographic machine called "Durch Einwerfen einer Münze zu bethätigender Apparat zur selbstständigen Herstellung von Photografien" [self-operating machine for the autonomous production of photos by dropping a coin]. From the 1890s on, this was followed by some similar patents. For example the "Bosco photographic procedure" of Conrad Beritt or the "photo self-selling machine" by Anatol Marco Josepho in the year 1924. In November 1927 the foundation of the European-American Photomaton Inc. and the International Photomaton Inc. with a capital of 3.5 million Marks and an economic profit of 88 million Marks in 1928 took place. The technical differentiation of the apparatus and cultural form of photography can therefore be described as accompanied by the discourse of "picture-it!"-technologies from its beginning. It is not the precise technical-apparative differentiation which interests me (of course it is also interesting to think about the self-photographing-machine as a predecessor of Polaroid for example). But I am far more interested in the photographic and historical discursive traces within this meaning productive and representational arrangement. Many phototheoretical ideas (such as questions of the use of the apparatus or the production of visual knowledge) are connected to the history of the photomaton. Others are very genuine problems of this special form of the technical production of representation. Very obvious, of course, is the euphoria of the current - or the effects of realtime. Also inherent is the "emancipational gesture" of an "authentic" and "anti-aesthetic" way of producing photographic images (like the German worker photo movement of the 1920s, to the Polaroid series of Andy Warhol in the 1970s and 1980s until to the lomographic movement of the 1990s). On the other hand the "picture-it!" cabin introduces its very own impulse in the field of technical produced images. For example the very own relation of the subject of the photo and the apparatus itself: the mirror as a panoptic tool of a (picturable) discipline of the self - or as a Lacanian imago, compensating between the apparatus and the "moi"? At least this situation can be described as an opposition of the subject and its reflection "in absentia" of the technical tool (like the lens or other optical devices) or a form of operator. We can speculate if this is maybe a strategy of a technical veiling, a naturalization of the technical and ideological system. Of equal interest is surely the specific (in the words of Foucault certainly describable as "heterotopy") spatiality of the "picture-it!" cabin. The idea of the cabin puts a clue on a certain spatial situation of isolation and stepping out of an public topology. There are lot of similar places: toilets, the voting booth, the dressing cubicle, the porno cabin or the confessional are some examples of those other "places". The concept of this specific topology continues in the prefered places to put the photo cabins up. Railwaystations or department stores are transistory places (in the words of Marc Augé), passages (Walter Benjamin) or specific places of consumption. So we have a specific topology of possible strategies of naturalisation as well as a connection to self evident processes of image-making. And this is a last argument for a discursive argumentation of the interference of technical and epistemological formations of the "picture-it!" technology with a wider field of visual knowledge in an genealogic as well as an archaeological sense. Topics of surveillance and video techniques of panoptical systems are as well parallel discussable as the more spatial and subject orientated aspects of the "self-operating machine for the autonomous production of photos".