Five Points shuts down for one weekend every August, fills up with people dressed as produce, and becomes the best argument East Nashville has for itself. We brought four booths.
Tomato Art Fest ran Friday, August 7 from 5 to 10 in the evening and Saturday, August 8 from 9 in the morning until 7 at night, centered on Woodland Street. We were there for both days, printing strips for anyone who wanted one.
Nashville is home for us. Our shop is here, most of our team lives here, and a good number of our venue placement partners are within a couple of miles of that intersection. Doing this festival is not really a job for us. It is the one weekend a year where the whole neighborhood turns into the thing we spend the rest of the year trying to build in single rooms.
What Tomato Art Fest actually is
For anyone who has not been: it started in 2004 as a small art show at Art and Invention Gallery, put together by Meg and Bret MacFadyen, celebrating the tomato. That was the entire idea. An art show about a tomato, with a few neighborhood events attached to get people through the door.
Twenty-three years later it closes down a neighborhood for two days, pulls in tens of thousands of people, holds a world record for the most people wearing fruit and vegetable costumes at once, and is still free to walk into. It gets voted the best festival in the city in local reader polls more or less every year. There is a main stage, an absurd number of contests, art everywhere, and food in every direction.
And it has stayed stubbornly itself the whole time. In a city where a lot of things have been discovered, packaged and priced accordingly, Tomato Art Fest has declined to become a product. The tomato remains, in the festival's own words, a uniter and not a divider.
It is our kind of event. We build unforgettable moments where it’s only job is to make people look good and hand them something to keep. This is a festival built on roughly the same principle.
What we built for it
Four booths were separated into a pair of two. Every panel was wrapped for the festival. The official Tomato Art Fest badge, the tomato in the circle with "East Nashville" running around the edge, sat on deep green with a repeating tomato print behind it. Alongside that we ran a cream panel scattered with hand-drawn tomatoes, and finished the lower cabinets in red and cream vertical stripe, which is about as close to a circus tent as we get without apologizing for it.
The frames stayed brushed aluminum. The curtains stayed natural canvas. The floors were green and cream checkerboard. Above each booth sat the marquee: MAJESTIC, PHOTOS, lit in cream letters on red. Out front we stood a double sided tower in the festival's green and red with a lightning bolt on it, tall enough to spot from across the lot. That matters more than it sounds at a festival. When there are two hundred things competing for attention at eye level, the thing people find is the thing that is taller than the crowd.
Then the red carpet and the brass stanchions with the velvet rope. A line at a festival can either look like a wait or look like an entrance. We would rather it looked like an entrance, and the difference costs almost nothing.
Designing for one weekend
Every wrap we do is designed for the event it is going to, and a festival is a particular case, because the booth has to hold its own against a whole street of colour.
The instinct is to go louder. Usually the better answer is to go more specific. We did not invent a tomato motif for this. The festival already has one of the best pieces of visual identity in Nashville, that circular badge, so the job was to let it sit properly on a cabinet rather than to compete with it. Deep green does the heavy lifting because it is the colour nobody else at a tomato festival is using. Everyone else goes red.
The other thing a festival wrap has to survive is being seen up close by tens of thousands of people, in daylight and then again at night under the marquee. Colours that look right at 2 in the afternoon can go muddy at 8 in the evening. Warm light forgives red and flattens green, which is part of why the stripe and the badge got separated onto different panels instead of layered on top of each other.
By golden hour on Saturday the whole bank of booths was glowing under the tent and the light was doing most of our work for us. If you want this level of intentionality and care in your photo booth I think we should talk.
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The part we always underestimate
Enclosed booths do something at a festival that open air setups do not. You pull the curtain and for about forty seconds you are not at a festival any more. No crowd, no stage noise bleeding across the lot, no queue behind you. It is just you and whoever came in with you, and a light that is about to go off. Then you step out holding something.
We watched it happen all weekend. Two people in at a time, mostly. Groups negotiating who gets the bench and who has to crouch. Kids on laps. Couples who clearly had a routine worked out. People in full tomato costume, entirely unbothered, folding themselves onto a bench in ninety degree heat because the photo was worth it.
That last group is why this festival is a genuinely good fit for what we make. A booth rewards people who commit to the moment, and Tomato Art Fest is two solid days of people committing to the moment. Nobody comes to Five Points in a tomato hat to be reserved about it.
Every one of them came out the other side with a strip they were already showing to somebody before it had finished curling.
Why the printed strip still matters
Those strips are the whole point, and they are the thing that separates a booth from a phone.
A phone photo goes into a camera roll with four thousand others and is functionally gone within a week. A printed strip goes on a fridge, in a wallet, tucked into a mirror frame, and it has East Nashville and the year printed right there in the design. It becomes an object rather than a file.
We see the long tail of this in our installations around town. People find a strip in a drawer years later and remember the night. That is a strange and lovely thing for a business to be in, and it is the reason we keep building classic photo booths with real printers in them instead of something cheaper and lighter.
Our corner of 37206
We have a lot of booths in this part of town. Lakeside Lounge and Schulman's in East Nashville, Pearl Diver, Otto's, and L.A. Jackson across the river. Some of the same people who queued up on Saturday have almost certainly been in one of our booths on an ordinary Tuesday without knowing it was the same company.
That continuity is the thing we like most about working in our own city. A festival booth is there for two days. A booth in a bar is there for years. Both do the same job, which is to give people a reason to stand still together for forty seconds and something to take away afterwards.
How we partner with festivals
Tomato Art Fest was a partnership rather than a drop off. That is how we prefer to work on our photo booth festival installation, and it is most of what we do outside of venues.
In practice it means we sit down with organizers early enough to design the wrap around the festival's own identity instead of stamping our logo on something generic, then we handle delivery, install, staffing across every open hour, and breakdown. Nobody on the festival's team has to think about the booths once they are standing. That is the whole arrangement.
For festival organizers there is a second thing worth knowing, which is that a booth is one of the few activations where a sponsor's branding leaves the site in somebody's pocket rather than ending up in a bin on the way out. That makes it unusually easy to justify to whoever is funding it.
Want a booth like this at your event?
We design and build custom photo booths for festivals, brand activations and venues, and we deliver them anywhere in the country. Every wrap is drawn for the event it is going to. The Tomato Art Fest booths existed for exactly one weekend and looked like they had been built for Five Points, because they had been.
If you are programming a festival, planning an activation, or looking at photo booth rental for a venue in Nashville or anywhere else, and you want people leaving with something in their hand, tell us what you are building and we will design something that belongs in it.
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