Sticking your face in a cutout and taking a picture is a staple at carnivals, birthdays or other events. The classics are the muscle man or a woman in a bathing suit, but nowadays you can find almost any type of cutout.

What's interesting is that these pieces of cardboard or wood have a much more sophisticated name. "Comic foregrounds" is the official term, bestowed upon the pieces by their original creator Cassius "Cash" Coolidge.

If you've ever seen the famous Dogs Playing Poker paintings, you've probably heard of Coolidge. He was a self-taught artist who also painted cartoons and taught penmanship. His paintings depicting dogs in human situations are best-known today, and he is most likely the inventor of that motif.

But let's come back to the comic foregrounds. He received a patent for "Processes of Taking Photographic Pictures" on April 14, 1974. The patent reads: "The nature of my invention consists in a process of taking a photograph or other picture of a person's head large on a miniature body."

Joel Lewis describes Coolidge's invention as "carnival cutouts." "The device was a painted wooden facade featuring a colorful character in an outlandish situation with a hole where the head should be." A person could stick their head into the hole and a photographer would capture the image for posterity.

The most popular iterations of the genre were "a weightlifting hunk," a "bathing beauty," a "swimmer perilously clenched in the mouth of a shark" or a "fat man in a bathing suit." Yet Coolidge penned over 200 drawings of possible characters for beachgoers to get photographed as. 

In many of the drawings, Coolidge used images of animals. There's a human head with the body of a monkey among his sketches. Human heads disassociated from the human body seemed to interest Coolidge in general. There are many sketches depicting severed heads; in one of them, a head is even served on a platter.

In many of Coolidge's other sketches, the characters are simply vignettes of simple everyday life. Jordan Beer and Albert Narah suggest that it wasn't the imaginative setting that attracted customers. "It was the possibility of memorializing the act of being represented itself – of recording one’s own re-creation as an image," they write.

The photo stand-in we know nowadays actually predates Coolidge's design. Yet he is still credited as the inventor of the comic foregrounds. Coolidge acknowledges this in his patent, but his successful marketing is probably the reason why today we know him as the father of photo stand-ins.

Tourist attractions in 19th-century Egypt are somewhat similar to what we today understand as photo stand-ins. They weren't particularly created or painted for that purpose, but rather were existing historical artifacts. A hole would be in the place of a face in a sarcophagus and tourists could stick their faces in it for a picture. One example is the Archduke of Austria Franz Ferdinand posing as a mummy in Cairo in 1984.

Another example of early photo stand-ins is seen in the pictures taken by photographers Pascal Sebah and Émile Béchard in Cairo in the 1870s. It also features a man and a woman putting their faces in a sarcophagus, replicating the look of a mummy.

I wonder how many people were disappointed by the poor penmanship of the failed attempts at artistry from this list. In a way, a photo stand-in gone wrong is an unforgettable souvenir in itself. A cardboard cutout might be enticing because of its absurdity as well. So let us know which cutout fails you liked the best, pandas. Upvote your favorites!