Additional Views, “Adieu!”

​This box started with a couple of goals in mind. One, I’d stumbled across the picture above and thought it would make for a great small box diorama. Two, I’d wanted to try my hand at doing a scene as tight and small as possible—the sort of box diorama that my friend and co-editor Barry Biediger has made a specialty of. And three, I thought the lighting possibilities could be very dramatic, with the dim lighting of the main room (the back corner of a dive bar/music joint, as I envisaged it) periodically interrupted with the bright flash of the camera inside the photo booth. As always, I started with the research, collecting dozens of images of photo booths in the period I chose (late ’50s/early ’60s) and low-key rocker-girl fashions. I really tried to keep the scene tight, as evidenced by the shot below of the earliest planning, then moved on to building the booth (roughly to scale) and sculpting the girl. Barry designed the programmable chip to set the timing of the photo flash, and added a dimmer to control its brightness. I handled the rest of the lighting per my usual methods.

The project was really quite simple. The photo booth was made with sheet plastic. Sculpting of the girl was done on top of 1/24th-scale Preiser pieces, with a mix of Duro and Apoxie Sculpt. I proud of the details you can’t quite see in the photo—a stuffed suitcase, cases of beer and soda stacked in the left corner, and rock ’n’ roll gig posters on the walls. But the lighting is really the star, and the flash, unfortunately, is something you’ll have to wait to see in person. Thanks for the assist, Barry!