Contemporary Arts Center

The Contemporary Arts Center does not have a permanent collection.

It never has. The CAC was founded in 1939 as the Modern Art Society and it has spent nearly ninety years as a non-collecting institution, which means everything inside it is on its way somewhere else. Shows arrive, run, and come down. The museum describes its own programming as the art of the last five minutes.

Our booth, on the other hand, is not going anywhere.

A permanent thing in a museum that keeps nothing

That is a slightly unusual thing to be, and it is the reason this placement is worth a page.

Almost everything we install goes into a building that already owns its contents. A bar owns its chairs. A record shop owns its racks. The CAC owns a Zaha Hadid building, opened in 2003 and her first completed work in the United States, and then deliberately fills it with things that belong to other people and leave on a schedule.

So the short list of objects that actually stay at the CAC is a strange one. Nam June Paik's Metrobot has stood outside the building since 1988, a tall aluminum robot facing the street. And now there is a photo booth inside.

Two machines, both metal, both about images, neither of them going anywhere. We are not going to pretend that is a curatorial argument. But it is a nice position to be in, and it says something about what a long term booth is for: it is the part of the experience that is the same every time somebody comes back, in a building where nothing else is.

In the shop, which is the right room

Our booth is not in a gallery. It is in the shop, beside a rack of BLINK artist prints and a shelf of editions, in the glazed corner of the ground floor with the street on one side.

That placement is the most obvious thing in the world once you see it, and it took the CAC to see it.

A non-collecting museum is a building full of things nobody can take home. The shop is the one room where that rule is suspended, and it is the only space in the whole institution whose entire function is sending people out holding something. A machine that makes a print on demand, with the visitor in it, belongs in that room and nowhere else in the building.

It is also why we did not dress the booth as an exhibit. The marquee reads PHOTOBOOTH, the side panel reads PHOTOS with the CAC mark under it, and the floor plate is a soft pink. In a shop, a machine should look like a machine you can use, not like a work you are supposed to interpret.

Underneath it is our Classic booth, customized to the room rather than chosen from a list.

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Every frame gets a label

The strip is the part we would point at.

Three poses on a grid field, white lines over a flat color, and the same grid repeats on the booth's floor plate so the print and the machine are made of the same thing. The strips come in more than one colorway, a soft sage and a hot coral among them.

The detail, though, is the caption. Contemporary Arts Center is printed underneath every single frame. Not once at the foot of the card. Three photographs, three labels.

That is how a museum works. Every object on a wall has a line of type under it telling you what it is and where it is from. Nothing in a gallery is allowed to float unattributed.

So the card that comes out of the slot reads as catalogued rather than as a souvenir. Three works, each one labeled, by somebody who was in the building for about ninety seconds.

Why it is a placement

The CAC did not buy a photo booth. It went in through our Venue Placement program.

No capital, no hardware on the institution's books, and nobody on the front of house team thinking about paper, ribbon or a jam on a Saturday. We designed it with them, they approved the direction before production, we installed it, and we run it. Monitoring, maintenance and service sit with us.

We work with institutions through our museum partner program, alongside our booths at the Brooklyn Museum Corner Shop and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

Common questions

Where is the photo booth at the Contemporary Arts Center? In the shop on the ground floor, by the windows. It is a long term install rather than an event booth, so it is there whenever the CAC is open.

Do you need a ticket to use it? The booth is in the shop rather than inside the galleries, so access follows whatever the CAC's own policy is for that part of the building. Check with them.

How many photos do you get? Three poses, two prints. One to keep and one to give away.

Did the museum have to buy it? No. It went in through our Venue Placement program, which means no capital outlay and no hardware on the institution's books. We design it with them, build it, install it and run it. The mechanics are set out in how a long term booth works.

Want one in your building?

We design and build custom photo booths for the room they are going into and install them through our Venue Placement program, with maintenance handled by us. We also run brand activations nationwide.

If you run a museum, a gallery or an attraction, tell us about the room, and tell us where people are already holding something on the way out.

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