Do photobooth à selfie: A cabine fotográfica e as gerações tecnológicas

Abstract

The photobooth goes through generations, provoking a continuous interest in a diversified public, preserved and, at times, raised by a strong revivalism, at the same time, being devalued by the new generations. Photography is, itself, the capture of a certain moment, and, in the booth, the photographic proof is simultaneously the event and its register, the object and the photograph. The user of the machine is the photographer and the photographed, the one that triggers the camera and the one that's captured by it, which consists in an interesting ambivalence hugely explored by the artistic community.
The photobooth became a strong instrument of self-portrait, self representation and subjective introspection as it allows to explore the concept of identity through an unique language: the
automatism, the image reflected in the screen and the sequentiality. In the other hand, the popularized selfie suggests a subjectivity that vulgarizes the self representation and collides with the search of identity. It's to that type of photography that the younger generations are dragged to, being completly absorbed by the digital universe, the era of the multiple identity of an almost infinite individual unfolding that explores the alter-ego in a continuous and dispersed way tending to anul the purpose of self-representation. The dynamic of the virtual and the online sharing, as in the social media networks, are no longer private, intimate or symbolic of reflection and introspection, characteristics of the booth. From that, this article questions and reflects the role of the photobooth and the self-portrait in today's generations, both social and technological.