The Photo Booth Edition

On daughters, delayed-meets-instant gratification, and how the tech actually works.

Matt Locke (ML) is a WITI contributor and the Director of Storythings, a content agency based in the UK. His previous WITIs include the Andy Warhol Album Covers Edition and the Platinum Photography Edition.

The photo booth at the Hoxton Hotel, Amsterdam

Matt here. On our family holiday in Amsterdam earlier this year, our 18 year old daughter had a map of spots she wanted to hit, mostly culled from Instagram and TikTok. One of them was for an analog photo booth in the reception area of the Hoxton Hotel.

I wasn’t sure it was worth the detour, but once we got the sepia-toned strip of four photos from the booth, I had a rush of nostalgia and love for these relics from my analog past. Growing up in the 1980s, my grandmother worked in a small sweet shop in a London train station, and when we used to visit her, my brothers and I would beg her for coins so we could have our photos taken in the photo booth opposite.

Back then, before digital cameras were widely available, the photo booth (and the polaroid, if you had the money) was the only way to get something even barely close to the instant hit of today’s digital photo era. In the analog 1980s, waiting only five minutes for the photo to develop felt like magic.

Why is this interesting?

One, because for my Gen Z daughters, the time the strip took to develop was the opposite: a rare moment of delayed gratification.

But also because seeing the results reminded me of the power of analog photography, and made me realise I had no idea how these machines actually worked. My assumption was that it was like a mini-darkroom in there—I imagined spools of negatives contact printing onto special paper to produce the prints. In fact, I found out that the way they work is much simpler, and fascinatingly unique.

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My first discovery was how beautiful the machines are inside. Inside each photo booth is a mechanical carousel of a dozen or so deep vertical tanks, just the right size for a four photo strip. After the four images are exposed on to the strip, it is passed on to a circular arm that holds and dunks the strip into each tank in order, through the developer, toner, and multiple water tanks to clean the image between each chemical bath. It’s like a mini fairground ride.

Secondly, I was wrong about the negative. The camera exposes your images directly onto a strip of photo paper, and then uses a reversal process to develop it into a positive image. First, the negative image is fully developed on the paper, then the image is bleached away, then the same piece of paper is again exposed to light and redeveloped. At this point, anything that was black in the negative will now appear white, and vice versa. The image is then fixed, dried, and washed a final time, which is why the photos are slightly damp when they come out of the booth.

This means, I realised, that every photo booth strip is utterly unique. As there is no negative, the only version of the images you’ve created are on that little strip of paper that pops out of the booth.

I could now really understand why my daughter wanted to make the detour. She has grown up in an age of instant, infinitely sharable images. For her, the magic of photo booths was exactly the opposite of the magic they’d held for me in my youth. Instead of being a fleeting glimpse of a futuristic world of fast images, for her, they were now a nostalgic relic for a slower, more private era.

Quick Links

• The photo booth was invented by the Anatol Josepho, a Siberian immigrant to New York, in 1926, so they’re almost 100 years old. The first of Josepho’s Photomaton’s was installed in Broadway. Here’s a great self-portrait of Josepho with his terrier dog, taken in one of his booths.

• This is a great mini-doc with Bre Saxon, a photographer from Birmingham, Alabama, who has restored an old analog photo booth. Worth watching for the lovely footage of the machinery in action!

• Autofoto is a company that collects, restores and hires analog photo booths. They have a great map of their booths in London and Barcelona. I didn’t realise there were so many in London, including at Tate Modern! I’m pretty sure it was Autofoto who supplied the one we used in Amsterdam.

• A&A studios is a similar company in Lyons, Illinois. They have a fantastically detailed and nerdy breakdown of the chemicals and processes used in analog photobooths.

• Photobooth.net is a comprehensive photo booth resources that has been going since 2005, tracking the location of analog photo booths all around the world, and curating the history of photo booths in popular culture. 

Thanks for reading,

Noah (NRB) & Colin (CJN) & Matt (ML)

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