As part of ‘Auto-Photo: A Life in Portraits’ at RMIT Galleries (5 June – 16 August 2025), and to mark the 100-year anniversary of the invention of the photobooth, a series of online seminars will be held which consider the history and contemporary culture surrounding the photobooth.

These talks will be held online via the Teams Webinar platform, and are presented by the Centre for Contemporary Photography, organised by Catlin Langford and supported by School of Art – Photography Discipline, RMIT University.

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24 July, Thursday, 7pm (AEST)

Collecting and Exhibiting Photobooth Works: Clément Chéroux and Patrick Pound, in Conversation.

Chaired by Daniel Boetker-Smith

Introduced by Pia Johnson.

Register here

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7 August, Thursday, 7pm (AEST)

The Photobooth Technician Project: Jen Grasso and Metro Auto Photo, in Conversation

Chaired by Catlin Langford.

Register here

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14 August, Thursday, 7pm (AEST)

The Photobooth in Art and Culture: Catlin Langford, Brian Meacham and Ruth O’Leary, in Conversation.

Register here

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All talks are free and run online via Microsoft Teams webinar. Upon registration you will recieve an email with a ‘Join Event’ button to click at the time of the talk.

Daniel Boetker-Smith is the Director of Australia’s Centre for Contemporary Photography (CCP) – the country’s leading photography institution. Daniel is an educator, curator, writer, publisher, and photographer. He is a regular writer/contributor to a range of art and photography magazines and publications internationally. Daniel is also the Founder of the Asia-Pacific Photobook Archive, a not-for-profit library of self-published and independent photobooks. Daniel regularly speaks at festivals and symposia internationally on the subject of photobooks, photographic publishing, & self-publishing in the Asia-Pacific area. He is currently an Adjunct Associate Professor in the School of Art at RMIT.

Clément Chéroux is currently Director at the Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson in Paris. He was previously Chief Curator of Photography at the Museum of Modern Art in New York (2020-), Senior Curator for the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (2017-2020) and Head of the Photography Department (2013-16) at the Musée National d’Art Moderne – Centre Pompidou. Chéroux is a photography historian with a doctorate in Art History. A graduate of the École nationale supérieure de la photographie in Arles, he has curated around thirty exhibitions, including the Henri Cartier-Bresson retrospective at the Musée National d’Art Moderne – Centre Pompidou in 2014. He has written and published more than forty books on photography and its history.

Jen Grasso (BFA Photography, MA New Media Art, MA Curating Collections & Heritage, PGCert Archival Studies) is the Digital Content Systems Co-Ordinator at the University of Brighton Design Archives. Her work and research lies in the intersection between analogue and digital technologies, and the use of technology to democratise culture and heritage within archives. She has also worked as a photobooth technician since 2015, first owning her own analogue booth and later servicing digital booths on the side. Since 2020, she has been working on The Photobooth Technicians project alongside artist/technician Marco Ferrari, a community archive project that documents the grassroots group of photobooth technicians before the media, and thus the profession, become obsolete. She has is also a creative practitioner working with photography, textiles, and craft and her work has been included in group exhibitions around the world.

Pia Johnson is a lecturer within the School of Art. She is currently the Associate Dean, Photography. Pia is a photographer and visual artist, whose work is engaged with performance and performativity. Her practice emerged out of a concern with issues of cultural identity and difference, stemming from her mixed Chinese and Italian Australian heritage. She is interested in reading and performing Eurasian ethnicities, intersections with gender, and the practice of photographing live performance. Pia’s work has been exhibited widely in Australia and internationally including the National Gallery of Victoria, Wollongong Art Gallery, Ballarat Art Gallery, Queensland Centre of Photography, Photography Centre of Perth, Gold Coast City Gallery, Pingyao International Photography Festival (China), The Museum of the City of Cuernavaca (Mexico), amongst others. Pia has been a finalist in many photography awards, including the National Photographic Portrait Prize, Ravenswood Australian Women’s Art Prize, Bowness Photography Prize, Josephine Ulrick and Win Schubert Photography Award, PCP’s Iris Award, Maggie Diaz Photography Prize for Women, Martin Kantor Photographic Portrait Prize

Catlin Langford is a curator, writer and researcher, specialising in photography based in Naarm/Melbourne. She is undertaking a PhD at RMIT focusing on photobooths and presently works with the V&A and Gallerie d’Italia in curatorial and consultancy roles. Langford previously held positions at the Centre for Contemporary Photography, V&A, Royal Collection Trust and Royal College of Art. In addition, she has curated exhibitions for Photolux Festival, Photo Oxford and Landskrona Foto Festival, and spoken about photography at the University of Oxford, Windsor Castle, National Galleries of Scotland, The Photographers’ Gallery and Birkbeck College, among others. Her debut publication ‘Colour Mania: Photographing the World in Autochrome’ (Thames & Hudson/V&A) was released in 2022, and she recently edited and contributed to ‘Auto Photo: A Life in Portraits’ (2024, Perimeter/Centre for Contemporary Photography). Alongside Metro Auto Photo, she curated ‘Auto-Photo: A Life in Portraits’ at RMIT Galleries.

Brian Meacham is a film preservationist living in Connecticut, USA. Trained at the Selznick School of Film Preservation at George Eastman Museum, Meacham has worked at film archives at Harvard University, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, and Yale University, where he is Managing Archivist at the Yale Film Archive. Inspired by the unlikely survival of analog photobooths into the 21st century, Meacham began tracking photobooth locations and photobooths in film in 2003. In 2005, he and Tim Garrett founded Photobooth.net, a comprehensive resource for all things related to the analog photobooth. The site tracks photobooths and photostrips which appear in film, television, music, and print, and keeps tabs on news in the photobooth world. Together, they have presented the International Photobooth Convention in St. Louis, Chicago, and Venice, California over the last 20 years.

Metro Auto Photo consists of Christopher Sutherland and Jessie Norman. The company was established in 2022. Christopher Sutherland, Melbourne born and raised, has had a career in photography, self- taught with a camera in his hands since early teens. Working as the head commercial photographer and videographer at a Melbourne marketing agency. He has over ten years’ experience as a professional photographer and videographer, and holds a Graphic Design Diploma from RMIT. Jessie Norman, originally from Brisbane, studied graphic design, working as a stylist and studio manager with Chris. Her attention to detail and passion for vintage relics has helped her curate and envision the future of these machines along with Chris. She has over professional experience in marketing, styling and graphic design, and holds a graphic design diploma from SBIT.C

Ruth O’Leary (based Djaara Country) holds a BFA from RMIT University and First Class Honours from Monash University where she was awarded the honours prize for her graduate work ‘Peaches’ which was exhibited at Neon Parc (2016) and led to her being shortlisted as one of five artists nominated for the BalletLab McMahon Contemporary Art Award. Her practice interlaces feminist, subjective and spatial ideas played out through the expanded field of painted dresses, photography and performance.  As a mother of three small children Ruth’s experience of maternity informs all her work. Artists in the early years of motherhood often shoulder an additional burden, seen as having their energies invested elsewhere, or as being “less serious” as practitioners. Rather than elide this tension Ruth puts it at the centre of her practice and gives voice and materiality to her experience as a woman, an artist and a mother. She has exhibited in solo exhibitions (Bus Projects, C3, TCB) and participated widely in group shows (Lon Gallery, Mary Cherry, ACCA) across Australia.  Ruth has completed residencies Berlin, Germany and studied on exchange at Aalto University of Art and Design in Helsinki Finland on the John Storey Junior memorial scholarship. Ruth’s work is held in private and public collections within Australia and Europe.

Patrick Pound challenges notions of singular authorship by creating works using found photographs and objects from his personal archives, which have been amassed through years of obsessive searching and sorting. Pound has amassed 70,000 vernacular photographs and numerous objects. His collections are categorized  according to specific characteristics, each containing their own highly subjective logic. As if the world is a puzzle to be solved, Pound forms complex arrangements and installations of images and objects from his archive,  creating new relationships and ways of seeing things. As he puts it: “To collect is to gather your thoughts through things.”