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 and sat behind a curtain. Eight minutes later, a strip of eight dried photos came out, with nobody involved.

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. In 1927, that was roughly eighteen million in today's money.

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.

So photographs were rare and serious. Most working people had only a handful in their lives, like a wedding, a military portrait or a family group. Nobody had a photo of themselves laughing or pulling a face with a friend. Nothing existed that could make 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 straight onto a strip of photo paper. That strip then travelled through developer, fixer and wash baths inside the machine before drying.

This is the origin of the shape. The photos sat in a vertical strip because they were made on one. A continuous ribbon of paper moved past the lens and then through the chemicals. 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 photo was one of a kind, which is why people kept and treasured them. It's also why the shape survives, even though digital cameras don't need it. There's more on that 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 booth strips. It showed 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. No artist made choices, and nobody directed the subject. In their terms it was automatic, the photo version of automatic writing.

That interest never really went away. Andy Warhol used booth strips heavily in the 1960s. They fed a 1963 Harper's Bazaar commission and his 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 to the 1960s, booths spread across America and Europe. They turned up in stations, department stores, amusement parks and piers. 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, booths made most official portraits. In many countries, that lasted into the 2000s.
• Courtship. Couples used booths constantly. In many towns, the curtain was the only private space young people had. A great many strips from this period show 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 but were not the same. There was no unique original, no chemical bath and no eight-minute wait.

A few real chemical booths survive, kept running by enthusiasts and specialist operators in Europe, Japan and the United States. People treat them like vintage instruments. Photographers still seek them out for the look 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, or purikura, in Japan. It kept the booth's basic form and added decorations, backgrounds and pens for drawing on the photo. Heavy digital retouching came later. It became a craze among teenage girls, then across East Asia. The sticker strips turned into a social currency that friends swapped and collected.

In the West the booth faded into a utility, while in Asia it became a social ritual. That split lasted about twenty-five years, and it's the subject of photo booth culture around the world.

A hundred years on

Almost every big photo invention of the past century was supposed to kill the booth. Instant cameras, compacts, camcorders, digital cameras and selfie cameras were all faster, cheaper and easier. Each was, on paper, a replacement.

It's still here, and more visible in the 2020s than in decades. You'll find self-photo studios in Seoul and Tokyo, booths at weddings, and browser versions with 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.

Each of those is a limit, and every new technology removed some of them to improve things. What the past century demonstrates fairly clearly is that the limitations were the product. Four chances and a hard stop make a different kind of photo than endless tries. That case is 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. It gave them a few frames and something to take away. A century of technological progress has not improved on the idea. The free online photo booth is a browser-based version of the same one.

The browser version even adds one thing Josepho never managed. In a Duo Booth, two people in different cities share one countdown and each keep the strip. That's why we call LensBooth an online photobooth for long-distance couples and friends.

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