Näkki Goranin lives in Burlington, Vermont, and she has a habit that started in the late 1960s when she was a child in Chicago. She picks up photo booth pictures of strangers.
Twenty-five years of that became a book called American Photobooth. Not one picture in it shows anybody she is related to.
Where they turn up
The pictures in the book were gathered at auctions, flea markets and antique shops. They sit in cardboard boxes among postcards and old letters, priced by the piece, the price of an object rather than the price of a memory.
Among them are farmers in overalls, sweethearts from the war years, and 1950s boys with their hair greased into ducktails. They stepped into machines scattered through railway stations, drugstores and amusement parks across America, back when a coin-operated booth was still new enough to queue for.
What all of them share is that nobody can put a name to any of these faces.
How a picture falls out of a family
This rarely happens because somebody came to dislike the picture, but because the one person who knew who was in it has died. Whoever clears the house afterwards opens a drawer and finds a small piece of paper carrying four faces entirely unknown to them.
Keeping a photograph of someone you cannot identify is hard, and throwing it away is no easier. The third option is to sell it by weight to a dealer, and from there the picture enters the market.
Three pictures in another book
Babbette Hines, who collects vernacular photography in Los Angeles, published Photobooth in 2002 with more than seven hundred pictures spanning seventy-five years. A few of them say more than a chapter could.
One shows a soldier, and on the back somebody has written three words, killed in battle. Whoever wrote that knew exactly who he was, and the picture still ended up where it is now.
Another shows a young man in a T-shirt whose face has been violently scratched out with something sharp. Scratching out a face takes a reason, and that reason is no longer known to anybody.
A third woman appears eight separate times, scattered across four different pages of the book. She went back to that machine again and again over the years, and all eight visits drifted to the same place in the end.
Why a stranger's face is worth buying
A studio portrait is always a portrait with a person standing behind the camera, and that person tells you to sit up, turn slightly, hold still and smile. What comes out is the face you want other people to see, assembled out of an instruction the whole trade spent a century teaching itself.
In a booth there is nobody at all. No photographer, no one adjusting a lamp, nobody standing there for you to be polite to, so the machine catches something else entirely.
That is why a collector will pay real money for a stranger's face, and it is the same thing Warhol saw when he drove a wealthy collector's wife to a coin machine on Times Square. Not because the picture is beautiful, but because it is honest in a way a prepared sitting never manages to be.
The back of a print is somewhere to write
Those three words survive to this day because a paper photograph has a back. Somebody picked up a pen and wrote into that blank space, and the line has travelled with the picture for eighty years through who knows how many hands.
An image file has no back. It has a name the device assigned, a date, coordinates if you left that on, but nowhere for a sentence written by a person.
Pictures are lost differently now
The strip you shot last week will almost certainly never sit in a box at a flea market. It lives in your camera roll, in a folder on a shop's server, and in a link you were able to scan once.
Every one of those has a limit. The server clears itself after a few days, the link will eventually die, the account will one day stop being opened, and a phone lasts four or five years at best.
The real difference is here. A paper photograph that goes missing still exists somewhere and still stands a chance of reaching someone like Goranin, whereas an expired folder leaves nothing behind for anyone to find.
What a few of them are worth
Nobody prints every photograph they take, and nobody needs to. But every year there are a handful you already know you will want to look at again in ten years, and those few are worth getting off a screen.
Print one for yourself and one for whoever is sitting beside you in the frame, because a picture kept in two houses is harder to lose than a picture kept in one. The piece on what size to print a strip covers paper sizes and fitting two copies on a single sheet.
Then turn it over and write on the back. The date, the names of the people in it, and one line about the day, because that back is what decides whether the picture can still name anyone later on.
Eight visits to the same machine
The woman who appears eight times in Hines's book surely thought those pictures were a private matter between her and the booth. She did not picture them lying side by side across four pages, leafed through by strangers in a bookshop.
The same thing waits for the strip you shoot this afternoon, except that yours will not travel nearly as far. Unless you print one and write your name on the back.