Last week, Vice Québec started a new series of videos called Les Reportages Vice. For the first episode, they featured my talented friend Meags Fitzgerald and discussed her love for photobooths. You can watch the 5-min video here, where you’ll see her flipping through her collection of 9K+ photos taken in photobooths.

You might recognize Meags by the way—or maybe not cause she's wearing a beard—she’s the first face you see on my home page. That shoot was from way back when I had initially featured her as part of my Montreal Artists series. I could pick illustrator, art director, artist or graphic designer, to describe her, but for the sake of this post let’s just say that she’s a photobooth expert. (Her first graphic novel is a tribute to photobooths.)

Not only does she know everything about photobooths, she’s also done countless art projects in them (and has consequently spent countless loonies). Vice wanted to document one of these projects, so she set the shoot up at Auto-Photo, a warehouse of photobooths. I came along to help.

She ended up creating a stop-motion animation using photobooth pictures. The concept behind her character was to have an Arctic Gender Explorer. She created everything from the background, costumes, and make-up. Drag has been one of her recent interests, but I don’t want to go in too much detail, because another Alex Tran x Meags Fitzgerald collaboration is coming up, and we’ll definitely talk about drag then.

With the way camera technology has improved, photographers are sometimes disparaged as merely being button pushers. The day of the documentary, I was definitely just a button pusher. All this photography experience used up to press a big photobooth button. (I was also helping setting things up, so of course I had to take a bunch of test shots, which Meags allowed me to keep).

It was awesome seeing the behind the scenes of one of Meags’ projects, and also behind the scenes of a Vice documentary!

Thanks for reading!