This article appears as part of the Herald Arts newsletter.

Do you remember photo-booths? They still exist, of course. But do you remember the ones where you didn’t have to pay with a smartphone then download the images from a website using a code and an app and an unholy confection of algorithms?

Where instead of all that digital malarkey you just fed in your coins, pulled whatever face you wanted in the booth then waited while the machine buzzed and whirred and eventually spat out a strip of resolutely analogue photos still sticky from the developing process?

Anyone old enough to apply for a passport at the dawn of the internet will certainly recall these sorts of photo-booths. They stood in bus and train stations, and in whichever corner of Woolworths was closest to the pick and mix. Today, however, they are vanishingly rare, which means they also have the glossy patina of 1980s and 1990s nostalgia – which means an initiative at Edinburgh’s Stills photography gallery is likely to have the hipsters out in force.

Being of the ageing variety and therefore able to remember negotiating photo-booths, I was second in line (behind a BBC film crew) when the new venture was unveiled to the members of the press last week. It’s called the Stillsautomat and for £7 you can mug for the camera in four separate shots and be presented with a crisp black and white photo strip to commemorate the event. I let my hair down (literally) and gave the world the finger.

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As the gallery’s cutely-titled development manager Caitlin Serey admitted to me, the venture is partly a money-making exercise (or fund-raising activity as they say in the arts biz). But under-pinning that is recognition of two things. First, that in recent years there has been a surge of interest in what Ms Serey calls ‘slow photography’. Second, that artists have long used photo-booths in their practice, so installing one in a gallery is simply acknowledging a fact.

Andy Warhol, to name one, was obsessed with photo-booths, and the image repetition which became his trademark look comes directly from the format. He even used one for an early magazine commission, taking his subjects (and a bag of quarters) to a booth in Times Square. The magazine ran the images exactly as they came out of the machine. Warhol shot many more images this way, including self-portraits – enough for a major book and exhibition in 1989 titled Andy Warhol Photobooth Pictures. As the man himself once said: “Art is anything you can get away with.”


I can’t claim to be any sort of Warhol. But when they were dry enough to be examined, my strip was artful enough for my liking.

Here you can read more on the history of the photo-booth and the Stillsautomat project. And if you want to congratulate me for getting through this without mentioning a certain 1980s Hamlet cigar ad, please employ another analogue process now making a comeback – and stick it in a handwritten letter to the editor.

Rock on… and on

Still with nostalgia, there’s something about the popular music of the 20th century’s middle years which seems to make it unassailable, so high is the pantheon in which it sits.

The Beatles are up there, of course, in part because their most significant member – sorry, John – is still performing at the age of 82. Ahead of the European leg of Paul McCartney’s ongoing world tour, The Herald’s Russell Leadbetter examines his staying power through the prism of a new book by veteran journalist David Hepworth about the continued appeal (and extraordinary longevity) of artists like him. The author calls it ‘rock’s third act’.

There are others in the pantheon also, too many to list. Let’s turn, though, to hard living jazz and blues legend Billie Holiday. Her cultural standing is untouchable – if anything it grows year on year, even though she died in 1959 aged just 44. But is the same true of her music?

In a thoughtful article examining how TikTok trends often employ speeded up or slowed down music by classic artists – Holiday’s Solitude is the latest to suffer that fate – The Herald’s Derek McArthur looks at her legacy and asks if algorithm-driven social media and its attendant demands amount to a wrong way to celebrate great music.


Many who never ascended the pantheon also deserve respect and, if they have faded from the record, then maybe also rediscovery and late recognition. Carla J Easton and Blair Young’s excellent documentary Since Yesterday: The Untold Story Of Scotland’s Girl Bands was my Edinburgh International Film Festival (EIFF) standout and was rightly chosen to close the event.

It shines the light on a number of all-female bands from across the decades, but perhaps the most affecting story in the film is that of Edinburgh-born Jeanette and Sheila McKinlay. Performing as The McKinlay Sisters, they made it into the charts, moved to London, featured on iconic TV show Ready, Steady, Go! and shared a bill with The Beatles and The Rolling Stones among others. The Herald’s Teddy Jamieson caught up with Jeanette, now an 80-year-old grandmother living in Dunbar, and hears her story. “They borrowed our eyeliner,” she says of the Fab Four.

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And finally

The Herald’s theatre critic Neil Cooper has been to Edinburgh venue The Studio (it’s tucked in behind the Festival Theatre, if you’ve never been) to take in a play about an issue which affects increasing numbers of people as well as the families who care for them – dementia. Moving it was, but Dementia The Musical came at the subject in an unusual way, as the title relates. Written by Lewis-based poet Ron Coleman and directed by Magdalena Schamberger, it used “agit-prop, Kafkaesque absurdism and a jazzy set of songs” (by Sophie Bancroft) to reveal its characters’ inner lives.

Neil also headed to Aberdeen for the opening night of the city’s excellent soundFestival, currently celebrating its 20th edition. The performance, in Huntly’s Forgue Kirk, was by Claire M Singer and consisted of contemporary works for the organ. Five stars from Neil for that one.