The cooler, elder sibling of the selfie turns 100: Celebrating the centenary of the photobooth

If you’ve ever chanced your photographic fate with an analogue photobooth, you’ll know the excitement of putting your coins in the slot, drawing the curtain and bracing for the first – always slightly unexpected – flash photograph, followed by the arrival of three more. Then there’s the eager four minute wait for the development of your photo strip: an unchangeable series of moments frozen in time.

These machines are magical for a number of reasons. The booths are, of course, miniature darkrooms in themselves, (the inner mechanics of which are nothing short of a spectacle) but these small spaces – separated from the outside world through the veil of a curtain – are also publicly available streetside photography studios, open 24 hours a day. The creative possibilities of the photographic format are endless, but also defined by restriction, and so the 2 metre high by 1 metre wide box has historically lent itself to quite out-of-the-box ideas.

That might be why this tight intimate space where we sit alone, or with friends, or lovers, has been hijacked by artists since its invention in 1925, namely: Andy Warhol’s famous series of self-portraits, which demonstrated his belief that the apparatuses of popular culture are a means to produce art, or Lee Godie’s who used the booths for portraits of herself throughout her art career, without stable access to a home or a studio. The machines have famously been loved by John Lennon and Yoko Ono and now by contemporaries such as artists like JR, who have taken the technology on the road.

2025 marks a special milestone for the machine and its impact on the creative or the average city dweller. It’s been 100 years since Anatol Josepho a Russian, Jewish inventor created The Photomaton and planted it on Broadway in New York. His creation saw immediate success and was multiplied all over the globe, but was slowly replaced with digital alternatives (with not nearly as much charm) throughout the 80s. Now, many of these old machines have all but died out. With a dedicated fanbase for the film-operated photobooths, however, they have seen a resurgence over the last few years. Thanks to projects like Autofoto and Metro Autofoto and the fans, technicians and enthusiasts surrounding the extraordinary invention, it’s impact is slowly being brought back to life.

Strike a Pose! 100 Years of the Photobooth, a new exhibition at The Photographers Gallery brings this side of the last century of photography into focus. Celebrating the centenary, the show will highlight the journey of the photobooth and some of its major fans throughout the decades. To mark the occasion we spoke to artist, photographer and professor Rafael Hortala Vallve and designer and lecturer Corinne Quin, the founders of Autofoto, alongside Taous Dahmani an art historian, writer and curator at The Photographers Gallery, to explore the continued relevance of the analogue in contemporary photography.

It’s Nice That: To start off, could you tell us a bit about Autofoto and how you came to collaborate with The Photographers’ Gallery on this upcoming show?

Corinne Quin (CQ): Autofoto restores and maintains analogue black-and-white photobooths across London and Barcelona. Our project is to keep these 20th century machines alive, allowing this form of photography to live on in people’s lives and continue to be used as part of creative practice. We first connected with The Photographers’ Gallery in 2021, coming out of the pandemic, where we managed to put a photobooth on the street outside the Gallery. Since then, we’ve been planning to do something to celebrate the centenary. Luckily, we found a way to collaborate!

It’s Nice That: Amazing! So it’s been 100 years since the invention of the photobooth – can you tell us a bit about its origin story for readers that might not know it.

Taous Dahmani (TD): Almost as soon as photography was unveiled in 1839, inventors dreamed of automating it, and experimental portrait machines cropped up through the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. But the true breakthrough came in September 1925, when Anatol Josepho – born in Siberia in 1894, trained in Berlin, seasoned by travels in China, and later settled in the United States – installed his Photomaton in New York City.

For twenty-five cents, sitters received a strip of eight portraits in just eight minutes. The booth caused a sensation, drawing crowds and sparking a company that rapidly spread the machines across the country. Within two years, Josepho sold the rights for about a million dollars to a consortium led by Henry Morgenthau, securing both fortune and fame while launching the photobooth craze across America and Europe.

Practical at first – cheap, quick and accessible identity photos – the booth quickly became something else: a private stage. Behind the curtain, anyone could perform beyond the gaze of a photographer. Sitters experimented alone or packed in with friends, kissing, laughing, trying on disguises or staring back with deadpan seriousness. The Photomaton promised autonomy: pull the curtain, face the lens, decide how to appear. Some likened the ritual to a slot machine: drop a coin, wait for the surprise. Josepho’s invention, in hindsight, feels like the ancestor of the selfie: it put image-making directly into the hands of its subjects, a century before smartphones did the same.

INT: As revolutionary as they were at the time, these popular coin-operated booths began to disappear with the rise of digital photography in the 1990s. Why do you think we’re seeing such a resurgence of interest in them now?

TD: In our digital world, we’re used to photographs that are instant, endless and easily stored or deleted. By contrast, the analogue photobooth resists perfection. Control is never total: the flashes are blinding, the stool wobbles, the timing is merciless. Each strip bears the marks of chance – a blink, a smirk, a blur, a half-formed gesture. That unpredictability is its charm, giving the images a peculiar energy that no app filter can replicate.

Their resurgence taps into the wider appetite or the tactile and the ‘vintage’: objects that feel authentic precisely because they escape the seamlessness of the digital. The photobooth doesn’t have a photographer mediating or directing the sitter. It’s a space of agency and play, where friends cram together or someone experiments alone, producing an image that can be private or shared, that can be spontaneous or completely staged.

In contemporary culture, where self-presentation is curated and optimised online, the photobooth is a refreshing counterpoint. The strips are imperfect, uneditable and physical – small paper relics that capture a moment in time with all its messiness intact. That’s why they resonate now: they remind us that identity is not just polished images, but also the accidents, surprises and fleeting gestures that make us human.

INT: Do you think that might be why the photobooth has been so popular with artists over the past century?

CQ:What I like about the photobooth, is that it’s like a private studio for visual experimentation. It provides an easy way to create – especially if you don’t have your own studio or a permanent home like Lee Godie, who was homeless for much of her life. You only need to bring yourself. The photo strip is often used as process material – for example, Francis Bacon used them as raw studies for his painted self-portraits, exploiting the varied angles within the four frames. Many artists have also worked with the physicality of the strip – Susan Hillier filled hers with writing, and James Slattery drew on his teenage photo strips, imagining the future identity of the woman he would later become on Warhol's New York art scene, Candy Darling.

Rafael Hortala Vallve (RHV):Artists always find the boundaries of a format and push them. I think it’s a matter of constraints. The machine’s rules – simple format, fixed timing, monochrome output, and automatic mechanical process, create a challenge to create something strange and different. Sometimes that’s without people. We love the work of Jared Bark, who made geometric patterns by covering the lens, and James Goggins, whose series Colour Tests show a colour chart is rendered across different machines, including an analogue black-and-white booth like ours. We’re currently working with artist Paul Elliman who used a photobooth to perform letters in My Alphabet in the 1990s; and photographer Jenny Lewis, who is engaging with communities with auto-immune disease, using the booth to make multi-generational portraits with them. The photobooth is a great excuse to work with artists and designers who we admire.

INT: Whether you’re an artist or not, these publicly available mini streetside studios have always offered up an affordable access to photography. With no technical knowledge needed and a self-service model, anyone can step behind the curtain and use the camera – why do you think this has been so revolutionary as a concept?

CQ:We often forget how common these photobooths were; they were a huge part of 20th century popular culture, found in public places like arcades, train stations and on the street. You could go at 3am and get a photo made! This anytime-accessibility was pretty revolutionary, opening up moments that otherwise may not have been documented.

RHV:The long, narrow form of this strip (which comes on a 180 long paper reel, to fit in the space-constrained cabin) not only created a new shape for the portrait (the 4 frame sequence), but a new genre of image – without hierarchy, without timestamps, and without an environment, which essentially put everyone who used it on the same level, rendering them in the same visual quality. I think that is really powerful. The photostrip is so common, but so original at the same time.

CQ:What feels truly revolutionary about our current era is the rediscovery of analogue photobooths that have been largely unavailable for 25 years, but which feel so familiar in our visual culture. A new generation is coming at it completely fresh.

INT:What can visitors expect to see in Strike A Pose! What was important to include in this archival display and celebration of the centenary?

TD: When we began shaping Strike a Pose!, our starting point was Raynal Pellicer’s extraordinary collection of photomaton strips. His 2011 book provided a sweeping overview of this material and became our visual blueprint. From there, the challenge was to imagine how these images could live beyond the page – how they might unfold in a gallery space as a story of the photobooth across the first half of the 20th century. Some of the earliest strips in the show date to 1927. From there, we watch the booth evolve: colour-tinted portraits appear, formats shift and different manufacturers experiment with frames, envelopes, speeds and strip lengths.

INT:Were there any unexpected gems dug up from the archives or interesting moments in the booth’s lifespan? What did this view of the last 100 years uncover?

TD: The collection draws heavily from European and North American sitters, but it’s far from limited to portraits alone. There are press clippings, for instance, that trace the arrival of the photobooth in Britain – small, ephemeral objects that suddenly open onto a bigger cultural history. It’s in these juxtapositions that the show finds its rhythm: the intimacy of a single portrait balanced against the wider backdrop of technological and social change. Seen together, the collection becomes more than a set of portraits – it becomes a record of innovation, fashion and curiosity.

INT: What do you think the next 100 years will look like for this analogue photographic device?

CQ:The world is changing so fast, but I think the ultimate beauty of this machine is the consistency of its output as technology races ahead. So our hope is that the machines themselves essentially stay the same, with updated and re-engineered parts that allow them to keep providing that consistent quality. The people and the characters change, but the format of the photostrip remains. In a way, the analogue photobooth is a time machine: a fixed portal that captures the spontaneous joy and weirdness of the present for the future.

INT: At Autofoto you have been rescuing and restoring these analogue booths for over a decade across London and Barcelona, what have you learnt about them in the process and what continues to motivate you to conserve their legacy?

RHV:Working on these machines is a humbling process. Just when I think I’ve understood, there is something more to learn – so we are constantly trying to improve! At the moment we are looking to understand and refine the chemical process to improve the quality of the photos and make the system more environmentally friendly. The most persistent challenge has always been the flashing system, the Achilles' heel of the machines, which has had three different iterations since the 1940s. The booths’ core design is solid, but the work is in improving vintage consumables and re-engineering fragile working parts which have become obsolete.

CQ: We really enjoy doing projects with different communities to play with the machine and capture a moment in time. We’ve made experimental group portraits with my BA Design students at Goldsmiths, in the wake of the pandemic in 2021; and more recently created a whole-school portrait of London Fields Primary School children and staff in collaboration with Tara Darby. The motivation comes from the want to share, and from the human element; it is amazing how people, especially first-time users, do things that are surprising and we’ve never seen before. The photobooth is a brilliant tool for documenting the community.

RHV:There’s also the motivation to do our own projects! As a mathematician I’ve been experimenting with geometrical configurations of photostrips, making abstract shapes. It’s a challenge and involves lots of trial and error but there is so much pleasure in the process. We also recently made a series of in-motion photostrips of our daughters, spinning on the photobooth stool, that we made into a flipbook publication. Perhaps because we’re so used to seeing still portraits, these images came out in an incredibly strange and dramatic way. There is so much creative potential with the booth.

INT:Definitely! We’re so excited to see the show and more future projects – can you tell us a bit more about the upcoming events Autofoto have in store for the rest of 2025 to celebrate the centenary?

CQ: The centenary has been the excuse to reach out to artists and continue the photobooths’ role in artistic practice. We’re inviting artists, designers and photographers to make work in the booth, with support from us on the technical nuances of what can be done. We’re working with Michael Marriott, Jenny Lewis, Paul Elliman, Yemi Awosile and Maki Suzuki. These projects are ongoing, there’s more to come.

We’ll also have photobooths at multiple exhibitions across London from October through to next year. These include Photomonth, The Joy of Analogue Portraiture, where we’re running a competition to take the best photo strip; At the Whitechapel Gallery for Joy Gregory’s retrospective ‘Catching Flies with Honey’ where Joy will be activating the booth with the public; and of course for The Photographers’ Gallery’s display Strike a Pose! 100 years of the photobooth where we’ll be running a ‘broken portraits’ workshop to make failed photo strips on 3 December, and we will also be doing a talk on the history of the photobooth in January 2026.

Strike a Pose! 100 Years of the Photobooth is on at The Photographers’ Gallery from 10 October 2025 to 22 February 2026.