For Benita VanWinkle, the movie house never stopped being a place where strangers briefly become a crowd with something in common.

In a first-person essay adapted from the forthcoming book America’s Hometown Movie Theaters, VanWinkle writes that she has spent more than 40 years photographing American movie houses built before the rise of the multiplex, turning a school assignment and a long-running pastime into an ongoing documentary project called Please Remain Standing.

VanWinkle said the work began as “a photojournalist’s desire to record these older structures before they were torn down and forgotten,” but shifted after a few years to celebrate “the endurance of the American movie theater, not memorialize its demise.”

She grew up in Largo, Florida, about 6.4 kilometres from Clearwater, where local theaters shaped her weekends. Largo’s theater, a 400-seat cinema in an old Quonset hut, closed when she was in junior high. Her family then started going to theaters in Clearwater, including the 1,194-seat Carib and the 944-seat Capitol.

VanWinkle recalled seeing Jaws at the Capitol in 1975 and said she still remembered “jumping out of my seat when the giant shark leaped out of the water at Richard Dreyfuss.” She wrote that the Carib became her regular theater as a teenager and later the first one she photographed.

That first photograph came while she was studying at Daytona Beach Community College, now Daytona State College. After a teacher assigned the class to “paint with light,” VanWinkle arranged to photograph the Carib before a Saturday matinee. Using a Nikon F on the bulb setting, she kept the shutter open for six to 10 minutes for each exposure while sweeping light across the auditorium in sections.

She made three frames. Only one worked.

Less than three years later, the Carib was demolished. “I was devastated to see how easily an architectural pillar of the community could be destroyed,” she wrote.

In 1988, VanWinkle moved to Illinois for a master’s degree in photography at Southern Illinois University. She said she had already been photographing theaters for six years when a professor asked what her thesis topic would be. Her reply was, “The documentation of vintage movie theaters.”

The project continued long after graduate school. VanWinkle said professor Charles Swedlund persuaded her to switch from black-and-white to color, arguing she was missing much of what made the theaters appealing. She agreed, pointing to “bright, saturated colors in neon signage, terrazzo floors, carpeting and wall coverings.”

She also quoted West Coast Art Deco theater architect S. Charles Lee: “The show starts on the sidewalk.”

For about 15 years, while teaching full-time at High Point University in North Carolina, VanWinkle has planned multistate “theater tours” between semesters, driving hundreds of miles and stopping at dozens of theaters. She said online resources have made the search easier, especially Cinema Treasures, which she called “an invaluable database.”

Her husband, Phil Norman, has joined her on those trips for the past 37 years, helping with traffic, weather and unplanned stops.

VanWinkle said she has now photographed theaters in all 50 states and the District of Columbia. She has visited more than 1,200 theaters.

The numbers behind the project show the scale of the decline she is documenting. The United States had about 22,000 movie theaters in 1930. By 2024, that number had fallen to 2,007, according to America’s Hometown Movie Theaters.

VanWinkle argues the moviegoing experience still matters because it brings different people into the same room. She quoted Kristina Smith, owner of the Callicoon Theater in Callicoon, New York, who told her in 2019: “We are becoming so isolated from each other that we can no longer tolerate our differences. Even within our own homes, we separate and watch different shows in different rooms, no longer sitting down to laugh with our families. In a theater, you have to sit next to a neighbor who might have different politics or values, sharing the same space. In this age, it’s one of very few places where this actually happens. I think it’s good for the soul.”

VanWinkle wrote that she has no plans to stop. “As long as I still feel that thrill when pulling up to a theater for the first time, I plan to keep going.”

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