In 2019 during a trip home to Chicago, while strolling the smut section of my favourite bookshop in Bucktown neighborhood…back nestled between the racks of zines (people still read zines?) I noticed an vintage analog photobooth. WOW! I had been buying books from this shop for years, but somehow never noticed the photobooth? Yet there it was. As if the whole thing had manifested before me like a portal to anther dimension. I paused briefly, staring with bemused delight. Then dubiously looked around myself, noticing I was the only person in this section of bookshop. Without a second thought I stepped forward grabbing a horse-head mask from the prop basket and walked right in, closed the short curtain, took my clothed off and fed the machine $4 bucks.
 
That first nude, horse head photo strip (strip #36 in the shop)  started it all. 
I'd loved analog photobooths since my first experience with them as a teenager sneaking into dive bars with my fake ID; but that particular experience and resulting self-portrait at Quimby's Books showed me a new way of what being an artist, can look like. That happenstance moment shifted the trajectory of my art as an artist. 
 
Since then I have gotten naked in dozens of analog photobooths around the world. Only 250 of these rare machines are known to still exist globally today.
 
Taking a nude photostrip is extremely tricky, by the way, not to mention illegal! Photobooths are located in dive bars, bookshops, hotel lobbies, street corners, art museums...very, very public places. I don't want to jinx myself, but I have yet to get arrested (or deported) for public indecency while trying to create my art. Though I am sure it's just a matter of time. 
 
 
UPDATE: sad news. The analog photochemical photobooth inside Quimby's Books, which had been located there for decades, was been replaced by a digital booth.