This is the first Venice Paparazzi photo booth on the boardwalk in Venice, California in 2003. We built it from wood scraps that we found around the neighborhood. The 2.0 Kodak camera, 13 inch TV screen, and HP photo printer were powered by a deep cycle marine battery making us mobile. Back then not everyone had a cell phone so it was a quite a treat for people to see themselves on the screen. Alex was the photographer, and Edizen was the tech.

As Alex would take pics of people walking along the boardwalk, he would yell “photo key chains… $5 dollars!” and point to the tv screen. Sometimes people did not like that, so if Edizen sensed hostility, she would immediately yell out “Gotcha.. Paparazzi!,” to lighten the situation up. Hence that is where we got the name Venice Paparazzi.