photo by Jacy Wojcik

Photo booth art by Jef Aerosol

The 2012 International Photobooth Convention was held this past weekend at the Electric Lodge in Venice. Yes, a gathering for hard-core enthusiasts of booths where you sit and get your photo taken.

But let's clear things up. These are not the digital photo booths of today. They are not the kind your cousin Denise had at her wedding, which seemed like a good idea until everyone was taking hilarious photos of themselves instead of paying attention to the cake-cutting ceremony and she cried.

These are the photochemical booths of yesteryear. The kind that haven't been made since the '70s/early '80s, can be expensive to maintain, require chemicals, and are a pretty rare commodity. Rare in the sense that, as convention co-founder Brian Meacham explained, these photo booths may have gotten new shells in the '90s but the moving parts are hodge-podged around from different machines. Even rarer in the sense that, we learned, all the old photochemical photo booths in Europe have been trashed, save a few Swiss booths now in Berlin; all the rest are digital. There is a growing community for photochemical booth fanatics and artists and this was their Comic-Con.

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Zócalo Public Square/Flickr

From left: Carla Hall, Carol Squiers, Adrian Grenier, Carolyn Davis and Galo Ramirez

I just emailed my photo to Adrian Grenier. He asked me to. Me, and about 200 others in the audience last night at Zócalo Public Square's event, "Are We All Paparazzi Now?" at the Getty Center.

It was an experiment, so he said. More like a little trick. Per his instruction, we all had our phones out ready to shoot -- him, we assumed -- but at the last second he told us to turn the cameras on ourselves. Send him the photo, he said, and he'll post it on his production company's website. "You're all part of this collective experience," he said.

Are we? Perhaps he was just trying to make us feel important. Or perhaps he was trying to illustrate how simultaneously voyeuristic and exhibitionist we all are. Either way, it was one of the many ambiguous answers provided last night to the panel's title question.

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Courtesy of the artist

Daido Moriyama's photograph Untitled (2011)

This week, artist and sunglasses designer Alex Israel debuts the talk show he shot in the Pacific Design Center, trombonists perform in a downtown art space, and fringe physicists reinvent gravity.

5. They're a collective, not a choir
The trombone is purportedly the brass instrument with a range closest to the human voice -- it's like a Southern preacher, only "with greater amplitude," said poet James Weldon Johnson. It's also one of the oldest instruments. "Trombone choirs" are old things, too, with centuries' worth of arrangements made just for them. But because the Los Angeles Trombone Collective is expressly not a choir, it avoids all of this. Its members favor retooled trombone solos or music not meant for trombone at all. This weekend, at alt-art space the Wulf, the collective will interpret John Cage and debut new live trombone electronica. 1026 S. Sante Fe Ave., #203, dwntwn.; Sat., May 19, 7:30 p.m. (213) 488-1182, thewulf.org.

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Terry Richardson's James Franco in Drag, Courtesy of the artist and OHWOW Gallery

Franco poses in drag for fashion photographer Terry Richardson, as part of the "Rebel" exhibit currently on display at JF Chen.

"There's just a lot of dicks in there. A lot of porno," painter Ty Williams says, shaking his head. "But I get it, though. I understand the prevalence of penises."

We're standing in the alleyway behind JF Chen, a collectible-furniture showroom and exhibit space, at the opening party for "Rebel," an off-site MOCA multimedia extravaganza produced by the world's most famous grad student, James Franco, in collaboration with an all-star cast of contemporary artists, including Ed Ruscha, Aaron Young, Terry Richardson, Paul McCarthy and Douglas Gordon.

Though Franco was somehow involved in all of the projects shown here, and his ongoing obsession with the sexual secrets and adolescent turmoil behind James Dean and Rebel Without a Cause drives the exhibit, the lineup of bigwigs confers an air of legitimacy lacking at some of Franco's previous shows and stunts.

The exhibit itself has been impressively built-out, looking like a soundstage resembling the Chateau Marmont, with videos playing in individual bungalows and shrubbery strewn with blow-up sex dolls and other detritus referencing the art.

And yes, there were a number of penises on display inside, as Franco and his partners grappled with the pent-up, feverish sexuality of adolescence by exploring, among other themes, the homoerotic tension on-screen in the 1955 film, Dean's real-life bisexuality and a smattering of behind-the-scenes affairs that reportedly took place before and during the shooting of the movie.

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Matthew Marks Gallery

Charles Ray's Sleeping Woman (2012), made out of solid stainless steel

This week's list includes an awkward, bearded voyeur in West Hollywood, a picture of a white horse in a Chinatown basement and stereoscopic images of made-up archeology in Crenshaw.

5. Underground Malibu in 3-D
The name "Malibu" comes from "Humaliwo," a word the Chumash Native American people used to mean "where the waves crash loudly." Benjamin Lord calls his new portfolio of stereoscopic photographs the Humaliwo Chambers, because they imagine a web of chambers and tunnels in the Malibu hillside. The photographs -- dense archeological fantasies of miniature coliseums in sand or rock formations covered in graffiti -- are meant to be seen in 3-D through a sterescope viewfinder. Lord has set one up and laid out his portfolios at the end of the main hallway in "Pale Fire," the new show Lily Siegel curated at Latned Atsar. 3222 W. Jefferson Blvd.; through June 4, by appointment. latnedatsar.com.

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Huntington Library, Art Collections and Botanical Gardens

Alfred A. Hart's photo entitled Locomotive "Gov. Stanford," circa 1865

Long before studios, hippies, method actors and reality-show wannabes headed out west, the Pacific Coast was a destination for farmers, miners, prospectors and other wagon-wheeling homesteaders who were looking for a new way of life. Two years after California struck gold in 1848, it became a part of the United States in 1850, and along with the Gold Rush, there was another rush to build a railroad linking the country's growing network of cities together.

"Visions of Empire: The Quest for a Railroad Across America, 1840-1880," on view through July 23, chronicles the construction of America's transcontinental railroad through original paintings, lithographs, magazines and other prints and ephemera from the permanent collection at the Huntington Library in San Marino.

Curator of the exhibition and the Huntington's H. Russell Smith Foundation Curator of Western Historical Manuscripts Peter Blodgett explains: "As much as the exhibition will cover the technological marvels, engineering feats and entrepreneurial audacity of the railroad age, it also tells the story of how the vision of American continental expansion evolved through a range of historical contexts -- from the age of Andrew Jackson through the Gold Rush, Civil War and Gilded Age of the late 19th century."

Here is a selection of images from the exhibition, with a few nuggets of valuable historical info sprinkled throughout.

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Four hundred years ago, stargazing was practically illegal. The Roman Inquisition sentenced Galileo for supporting Copernican astronomy, and most people still believed the Earth was flat.

Fortunately, science has since come a long way, and now, NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab in Pasadena has made space exploration a viable industry in Southern California -- on par with film, television, improv and bikini waxing. Today, we're still welcome to join the Flat Earth Society, but most of us accept the fact that we're not the center of the universe, with the exception of the Scientologists, perhaps.

As a celebration of our achievements in the field of space exploration, the Williamson Gallery at the Art Center College of Design presents "The History of Space Photography" -- one in a series of exhibitions that examines the nexus of art, science, history and literature. On view through May 6, the show features 150 images that chronicle the advancement of extraterrestrial picture-taking, from black-and-white images of the moon to incredibly detailed digital photos of galaxies outside our solar system.

In the words of none other than Leonard Nimoy, aka Star Trek's Mr. Spock: "If millions of people will contemplate the images in 'The History of Space Photography,' perhaps for a moment, politics can take a rest and compassion, social justice, the dignity of humankind can be advanced an inch."

With this in mind, check out our mini-collection of photos from "The History of Space Photography," with insights from the exhibition's guest curator, Jay Belloli.

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Melodie Mousset

"Removing Boulders," from The Rock and Eagle shop

Everything's social this week -- jokes with friends spur a pop-up shop, a four-course meal becomes an exhibition and a group of artists tries to figure out why time can terrify.

5. Dinner-party graveyard
In late March, Jason Kraus invited 12 people to dinner. Everyone had to commit to come seven nights in a row and eat the exact same four-course meal. Each night, Kraus set a new, specially constructed wood table with identical but different china, glasses and silverware. After the final dinner, he cut up the tables and turned them into cabinets. All seven tables-turned-cabinets now hold the stained napkins and cleaned plates, cups and utensils. They're on view in "Dinner Repeated" at Redling Fine Art. It's like a shrine to a party you missed. All you can do is spot the anomalies -- the red wine stains on one shelf, the lipstick marks -- and guess at what happened. 6757 Santa Monica Blvd.; through May 12. (323) 230-7415, redlingfineart.com.

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Rich Jhong

In anticipation of this year's CicLAvia event, CicLAvia asked participants to submit photos from the past three events. We waded through mounds of great photos (check out CicLAvia's Flickr pool for even more shots) and picked out our 10 favorites. Check them all out after the jump.

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courtesy Leonard Koren

Table of contents from an issue of WET

It was in 1977, in a bathroom in Berkeley, that architect Mark Mack put his body on the line for his fellow man.

As a photographer stood by to record the action, a naked Mack gingerly lowered himself, ass first, into a bathtub. The shoot had a simple objective: Demonstrate how a man could enter a bath without burning his balls.

Printed with a hilarious, faux-modest black bar across Mack's genitalia, the story was a classic piece of editorial for WET: The Magazine of Gourmet Bathing.

It was not the only irreverent piece the Venice-based magazine ran. After all, the masthead featured the publication's phone number after the phrase "in event of extremely good news." And its first party was held not at a bar but a bathhouse called Pico-Burnside Baths.

"There were people in tuxedos and people naked," remembers architect Fred Fisher, who cruised the music and food of the bash with his wife and new baby.

But WET was far more than high jinks -- it was a steamy evocation of the bathing experience, from rural natural spring to urban bathroom, as documented by artists and writers decades before America fell in love with the spa. WET, the subject of the new book Making WET: The Magazine of Gourmet Bathing (out April 17), was sensual not sexy, provocative not sexist, as liable to feature men in various states of undress as women, not to mention delicious photos of the bathing environment.

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