The History of the Photo Booth

In September 1925, a Siberian-born immigrant named Anatol Josepho opened a small shop on Broadway in New York. Inside was a machine he had spent years designing: you put in a quarter, sat behind a curtain, and eight minutes later a strip of eight photographs emerged, developed and dried, with no human involvement at all.

It was called the Photomaton. Within six months it had photographed more than 280,000 people. Queues formed down the block and stayed there. Two years later Josepho sold the American rights for one million dollars - an extraordinary sum in 1927, equivalent to roughly eighteen million today.

What he had invented was not really a camera. It was the first machine that let ordinary people photograph themselves, privately, without asking anyone's permission. A century later that idea has not stopped mattering.

Before the booth: photography was a formal event

It is difficult now to appreciate how significant this was, because we have entirely lost the context. In the early 1920s, being photographed meant visiting a studio. It meant an appointment, a fee, a photographer arranging you, and a formal result several days later.

Photographs were consequently rare and serious. Most working people had a handful in their entire lives: a wedding, perhaps a military portrait, occasionally a family group. Nobody had a photograph of themselves laughing, or pulling a face, or with a friend on an ordinary afternoon, because no mechanism existed for producing one.

The booth removed every barrier at once. No appointment, no photographer, no explanation of why you wanted it. A quarter and a curtain. For the first time, a person could decide unilaterally to be photographed, and then decide how to appear.

How the machine worked

Josepho's design was ingenious and entirely mechanical. There was no negative and no printing stage. The camera exposed directly onto a strip of photographic paper, which then travelled through a series of chemical baths inside the machine - developer, fixer, wash - before being dried and delivered.

This is the origin of the shape. The photographs were arranged in a vertical strip because they were made on a strip: a continuous ribbon of paper moving past the lens and then through the chemistry. The format was not a design decision. It was a consequence of the mechanism.

It also explains the other defining characteristic. Direct-positive processing produced exactly one copy. There was no negative, so no reprints. Every booth photograph was unique, which is a large part of why they were kept, given away and treasured in a way that mass-reproduced images were not - and why the proportions persist even now that nothing about digital capture requires them, as covered in photo strip sizes and dimensions.

The Surrealists get there first

The booth was taken seriously as an artistic tool almost immediately, and by an unexpected group.

In 1929 the Belgian Surrealist journal Variétés published a collage of photo booth strips of André Breton, Salvador Dalí, Luis Buñuel, René Magritte and others, all with their eyes closed. The Surrealists were fascinated by the machine for a specific reason: it removed the photographer. There was no artist making choices, no one directing the subject, no mediating human eye. It was, in their terms, automatic - the photographic equivalent of automatic writing.

That interest never really went away. Andy Warhol used booth strips extensively in the 1960s, including for a 1963 Harper's Bazaar commission and as source material for silkscreen portraits. He liked the same thing the Surrealists had: the machine's indifference. It photographed everyone identically and flattered nobody.

The golden age, and what it was used for

From the 1930s through the 1960s booths spread into railway stations, department stores, amusement parks and seaside piers across America and Europe. They became genuinely ubiquitous, and their uses were more varied than nostalgia usually remembers.

• Identification. Passports, travel permits, identity cards and work passes. For much of the twentieth century the booth was the standard mechanism for official portraits, and in many countries it remained so into the 2000s.
• Courtship. Couples used booths constantly. The curtain provided the only private, unsupervised space available to young people in many towns, and a great many booth strips from this period are of people kissing.
• Correspondence. Soldiers sent strips home. Emigrants sent them across oceans. A strip was small, cheap, unique, and fitted in an envelope.
• Simple amusement. A cheap thing to do with friends on an afternoon, which is close to what it is again now.

The formal and informal uses coexisting in the same machine is part of what makes surviving strips so striking. The same apparatus that produced a stern passport photograph produced, ten minutes later, four frames of two teenagers laughing.

Decline, and the chemical booths that survived

The decline came slowly and from several directions. Instant cameras from the late 1940s let people photograph themselves anywhere. Cheap 35mm cameras did the same more affordably. Camcorders, then digital cameras, then camera phones each removed another reason to seek out a machine in a station.

The final blow to the original technology was digital conversion. From the 1990s onwards, operators replaced wet chemical booths with digital cameras and dye-sublimation printers. Cheaper to run, no chemicals to manage, no plumbing. The strips looked similar and were not the same thing - no unique original, no chemical bath, no eight-minute wait.

A small number of genuine chemical booths survive, maintained by enthusiasts and a handful of specialist operators in Europe, Japan and the United States. They are treated somewhat like vintage instruments, and photographers still seek them out for the specific quality of a real direct-positive print.

What happened everywhere else

While the Western booth declined, it was being reinvented elsewhere and turned into something considerably more elaborate.

In 1995, Sasaki Miho and Sega's Atlus released Print Club - purikura - in Japan. It kept the booth's essential form and added decoration, backgrounds, pens for drawing on the image, and eventually extensive digital retouching. It became a mass cultural phenomenon among teenage girls, then across East Asia, and the resulting sticker strips functioned as a social currency exchanged and collected among friends.

That divergence - the Western booth as a fading utility, the Asian booth as a thriving social ritual - lasted roughly twenty-five years, and it is the subject of photo booth culture around the world.

A hundred years on

The booth has now been declared obsolete by roughly every major photographic development of the past century. The instant camera, the compact camera, the camcorder, the digital camera, the cameraphone and the front-facing selfie camera were all faster, cheaper and more convenient. Each was, on paper, a replacement.

It is still here, and in the 2020s more visible than it has been in decades - self-photo studios across Seoul and Tokyo, booths at weddings and festivals, and browser-based versions requiring no machine at all.

The reason is that the thing being replaced was never the technology. It was a specific experience:

• A fixed number of frames. Four. Not four hundred.
• No preview and no retakes. What happens is what you get.
• A countdown you cannot negotiate with.
• Privacy. Nobody is watching or directing.
• A physical object at the end.

Every one of those is a limitation, and every replacement technology removed one or more of them in the name of improvement. What the past century demonstrates fairly clearly is that the limitations were the product. A machine that gives you four chances and then stops produces a different kind of photograph than a device that gives you unlimited ones - a case made at more length in the comeback of photo strips.

Josepho understood this in 1925, at least intuitively. He built a machine that let people photograph themselves in private, gave them a small number of frames, and handed them something to take away. A century of technological progress has not improved on the idea. The LensBooth booth is a browser-based version of the same one.

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