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The last time you went to the cinema, what did your ticket look like? Did you even get a ticket? Or just a QR code scanned from your phone? As cinema tickets get blander, a designer from Kilburn, Ben Smith, is keeping the romance of the cinema stub alive with an Instagram archive Tickets Please.
A cinema ticket nerd, Smith keeps all of his in a scrapbook. Has done for years: ‘It’s about having a physical memory of where you’ve been and what you’ve seen. I’ve got a bad memory for who was in what, or what year a film was released. But I can always remember what cinema I was in and who I was with. I’ve got a photographic memory for that stuff.’
Smith started his archive last month. ‘I wanted to document them before they vanish.’ The oldest stub in his collection is a ticket from a showing of Disney’s 1938 ‘Snow White’ at a cinema in LA.
The most eye-catching is ‘A Hard Day’s Night’ from a cinema in New York.
Smith’s personal favourite involves a ticket mess-up from one of his first dates with his girlfriend to see ‘The Hunger Games’ at a cinema in Wimbledon. ‘The cashier put through the wrong film, and printed a ticket for ‘The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel’, then scribbled it out. Those are the little eccentric details I like. Strange touches that make it interesting to me.’