20 Nostalgia-Inducing Photo Booth Snaps of Famous People

[Editor's note: It's Labor Day, so your devoted Flavorwire team is taking a break. To keep you entertained, we're leaving you with our most popular features of the summer months. This post originally ran July 14th.] Here at Flavorpill, we love a photo booth. There’s something so satisfying (and pleasantly retro) about the art of the instant photograph, and we love the spontaneity that always seems to come from all those quick photos in succession, with only a small space to work with. But we’re not alone in our photo booth love. Actors, musicians, artists and celebrities of all kinds have also been known to step behind the cheap velvet curtain and indulge in the fun of automatic photography, and inspired by these shots of Elvis we recently spotted at Retronaut, we’ve pulled an Amélie and obsessively collected a few of the results here.

Elvis, 1950s. Photos via Retronaut.

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I think Marilyn Monroe is the only one in the world who looks good in a passport photo!

http://pinterest.com/tailypo/celebrity-photo-booth/. In a postmodern turn of events I have added your James Dean non-photobooth shot, because he is adorable, obvs.

The core set of photos -- the actual photobooth pics -- are all from my pinterest board 'Celebrity Photo Booth'. I am kind of flattered and kind of, I don't know, weirded out.

I agree - I would have pared it down to the 10 best. That said, the one of Buddy Holly almost made me cry.

Yeah, this is incredibly lazy journalism when you include passport photos and professionally done portraits in a slideshow of photo-booth images. Some nice ones in the real ones here though.

love the energy of a photo booth- a friend had one at her wedding and the results were delightful! Elvis kills it- james Dean.... if this was his natural self, imagine the stress of being "James Dean". What a cutie either way, sigh.

A camera with a backdrop is not a photobooth. The close quarters of an actual photobooth make them much more interesting. And yea, James Dean didn't even look like a cool nerd, just straight dork.

Ditto about the VF fotos. I didn't know who they were anyway.

Oh, to look so effortlessly good in a passport photo.

The Miles pic is Unforgettable, pardon the mixed ref.

Bill Murray looks like a puppy.

dude, james dean was a NERD! awesome.

The Vanity Fair Photos are no mistake: it's just a "clever" way of advertising...

Was Elvis famous at this time? the chick looks like she doesn't want to be there.

I'm with Ted, Jen and Kumot. Those present-day photos have no business in this slideshow.

How about some thematic consistency? "Nostalgia inducing" is great when you're looking at Buddy Holly, Smith & Mapplethorpe or Audrey Hepburn & Truman Capote. Then you plop in Eli Roth and that adorable Zooey Deschanel. Why? I'm not nostalgic whatsoever for a Vanity Fair party that took place in 2011. Who edits this stuff? C'mon!

@John: Ah! Typo. Fixed, thank you. @jen: Nope. I thought they were fun.

Agreed that the VF photos have no place here. Did you just through those in to round the number of photos up to 20?

The Bill Murray shots are from a photoshoot, not a photo booth. You could have used some of Jack White from the photo booth that he owns or the Kills did an album cover "No wow" using photo booth photos. http://noplacetogosf.blogspot.de/2008/07/kills.html See I like some of the old originals, but to put them with the shitty Vanity Fair images that aren't even proper photo booth images.This is just lazy journalism, Flavorwire you can do better than this.

"Vanity Fair" Oscar party shots hardly induce nostalgia! Leave those out and you have a lovely collection of (mostly) the real thing.

Remarkable that this photo is assigned 1965 in consideration of the fact that Buddy Holly died in 1959.