“You couldn’t hold the photobooth to take the picture, but by allowing yourself to be encompassed by the booth. It was akin to stepping into a camera.”
—Gerard malanga
Before the photo booth, if you wanted a photograph of yourself and/or a loved one, you had to book an appointment with a photographer, sit still for several poses, and then wait weeks for the final product, usually for a relatively hefty fee.
Suddenly, self-portraits were available to anyone who had 25 cents to spend. Sailors on shore leave. The secretary on her lunch hour. Newlyweds leaving the Santa Monica Pier. Lads spending their last quarters after playing Skee-Ball in the Fascination arcade. The nursing student waiting for the strip of photographs to drop, still wet, waving it in the air to dry before sending it to her parents. All little pieces of time.
By the middle of the last century, every penny arcade, every county fair, every passport office, had one. For 25 cents, you could plop down on the booth’s vinyl seat, pull the curtain, drop your coin into the slot, and be rewarded with eight (and, later, four) images. Because there was a mirror just above the camera, you could check out your poses before each picture.
In the intimacy of the booth, it was just you and the camera. Maybe because of that, and maybe because the distance between the poser and the camera was perfect, the photo-booth snapshots were usually just right. No one, it seems, takes a bad picture in a photo booth.
The prototype photo booth debuted at the World’s Fair in Paris in March 1889. Its inventor, T. E. Enjalbert, dubbed it the Appareil pour la Photographie Automatique (Apparatus for Automatic Photography). Later versions soon followed, but they were not user-friendly, requiring as many as 20 people to produce a finished product.
In 1925, a Siberian immigrant and student of photography, Anatol Marco Josepho, created “the Photomaton,” the first truly automatic photographic machine, installing it near Times Square, on Broadway and 51st. It was an immediate hit, with folks lining up around the block to drop their quarters into a slot and get their instant, surprisingly high-quality, black-and-white photo strip printed on the spot, after a wait of only eight minutes.
Josepho formed the Photomaton Company (Franklin D. Roosevelt was on its board of directors), planting photo booths all across America. The one near the Strand Theatre on Broadway, installed in 1932, was so successful it kept the owner and his family afloat throughout the Great Depression. Josepho had produced the first model for $11,000, but he sold the rights to Henry Morgenthau Sr. for a cool million. The company was bought a few years later by William Rabkin, who re-christened it the more familiar Photomatic.
Over the next few decades, artists, actors, politicians, and citizens alike flocked to photo booths to have their pictures taken. In the 1950s, the booths were ubiquitous. In the 1953 musical The Band Wagon, Fred Astaire dances into a Photomatic, sits for his photos, then dances out again, to the tune of “All by Myself.” In Europe, Surrealists such as André Breton, Salvador Dalí, Luis Buñuel, and Max Ernst discovered them as an artistic medium, expressions of randomness, repetition, and surprise.
Andy Warhol was an early devotee, sending his Factory divas to a booth in Times Square in the 1960s. With a roll of quarters in hand and a fascination with repetitive images, Warhol spent hours feeding quarters into the machine, directing his subjects into various poses.
In 1963, Robert Scull, the wealthy owner of a fleet of New York taxicabs, commissioned a portrait of his wife, Ethel, an art patron and collector, for her 42nd birthday. It was one of Warhol’s first commissioned portraits, and it was his brainchild to take her down to the Photomat in the Fascination arcade in Times Square. Warhol then chose 36 photo-booth images and silk-screened them onto a canvas. From such scrappy origins emerged one of the most influential portraits of mid-20th-century art: Ethel Scull 36 Times, now owned by the Whitney Museum.
The New Yorker writer and critic Hilton Als wrote on his Instagram account that the series “never ceases to thrill me on so many levels … (the photo booth as cultural worker, the rich client who consumes art), consumerism mixed with art—if you’ve got it, flaunt it—and also the sheer magic of having thought this thing up in the first place. Gives me the shivers every time I see it.” Warhol returned to the Photomat in January 1965, accompanied by seven high-schoolers, for a Time-magazine cover story on “Today’s Teenagers.”
Warhol wasn’t the only American artist who saw the possibilities of the photo booth. Diane Arbus’s Self-Portrait in an Automated Photobooth was created in 1965 and is owned by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, in New York.
Then there are the strips of Marilyn Monroe (including a passport photo with Joe DiMaggio), a young James Dean (including one he took as a schoolboy), Robert Redford clowning with Barbra Streisand, Audrey Hepburn with Truman Capote and Mel Ferrer, countless Elvis Presleys. Some made it into the history books, such as the fetching strip of Jacqueline and Jack Kennedy on their honeymoon—unposed, fresh, bursting with beauty and beautiful promise.
Photographer and artist Nakki Goranin’s history, American Photobooth, draws back the tattered curtain, comparing the slender strips of photographs to “the frames of an old film … scripting narratives, small stories … moving objects and costumes in space for a second or two.” Goranin—herself the owner of three vintage photo booths—ruefully notes, “Fewer and fewer of the old-fashioned chemical photo booths survive, this American tradition stands on the threshold of extinction.”
But don’t weep for the photo booth. Monsieur Enjalbert’s invention has found new life in the Digital Age. The photo booth now has its own trade show. Vanity Fair rented one for the magazine’s 2012 Oscar party, back when those events were at their Olympian heights. Today, advanced models are outfitted with A.I.-powered setups, including 360-degree capacities, custom lighting, a video-recording feature, 3D printing, and photo-sharing via e-mail.
The photo booth is dead; long live the photo booth. Wait for the flash!
Sam Kashner is a Writer at Large at AIR MAIL. Previously a contributing editor at Vanity Fair, he is the author or co-author of several books, including Sinatraland: A Novel, When I Was Cool: My Life at the Jack Kerouac School, and Life Isn’t Everything: Mike Nichols, as Remembered by 150 of His Closest Friends
