One artist who has worked through many methods of using the photobooth as a medium for his art is painter, photographer, and politician, Jared Bark. From May, 1967, until the late 70s, he used the photobooth as a means to record what Roberta Smith in Altforum termed an "extensive self-portrait." For Bark, the photobooth became a device to make photographs of himself, of strangers, of other images, and of the booth itself (he did a series of photo booth pieces of the empty booth photographing itself). During the early 70s, Bark completed a series of Cross-Country pieces (1972) during which he drove from the East to the West coast, doing sociological portraits of residents of specific locales inside the photobooths at local shopping centers. His. Johnson City, Tennessee, Maclennan's Department Store, August 31, 1972" shows 11 rows of four frames each. Depicted are 11 local residents who posed for Bark. He documented ten American cities, including Las Vegas, little Rock, Reno, New York and Albuquerque. He traded one of his American city pieces with an artist in Sweden who did a similar piece in Copenhagen. In addition to his documentation pieces, Bark did a fantastic animal series (snakes, centaurs, etc.) made up of his head and body parts.


Bark has his own photobooth machine which he purchased from an arcade in New York's Rockaway Playland for $200. "The booth," he says, "contains lots of great mahogany since it was made by boatbuilders." Having his own booth allowed him to alter the chemicals in the machine, producing a variety of special effects. Two of those pieces are in this exhibit. Both are two-toned (caramel and black) geometric abstractions. His photo booth pieces have been written about in Artforum, Afterimage, and numerous photographic journals, and are in private collections, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Albert Knox Gallery in Buffalo and the Holly Solomon Gallery in New York City.