This is a fun little exhibition. One room at the Photographers’ Gallery is hosting a small display celebrating 100 years of the automatic photobooth. It turns out that 2025 marked the 100th anniversary of the invention of the analogue photobooth by American Anatol Josepho. His first Photomaton appeared on Broadway in New York in 1925. The photobooth was a game-changer for the world of photography and quickly became an everyday sight in cities around the world.
This little exhibition features a range of resources from the collection of photobooth enthusiast Raynal Pellicer. It includes a variety of classic photo strips, montages of historic snaps, display cases showing the different uses these handy little photos have been put to (for passports, identity cards, ration cards and much more). It’s part of a year-long programme of centenary celebrations, in partnership with AUTOFOTO. The gallery has even installed a photobooth for visitors to the Photographers’ Gallery to use (it accepts card payment).
A Photobooth timeline
1852-1915 – Inventors across Europe and the United States of America striving for full automation and experimented with the concept from ferrotypes and ‘Sticky Backs’ to early machines like the Bosco Automat and penny photo devices.
1925 – Anatol Josepho opened the first Photomaton studio in New York. For 25 cents, customers got eight portraits in eight minutes, drawing huge crowds.
1927 – Josepho sold U.S. rights for $1 million. Engineer John Slack improved the booth, cutting photo session time, reducing mechanical jams, and adding mirrors for sitters.
1925-1929 – Photomatons spread rapidly across the U.S., Canada, and Europe, with competitors quickly entering the market.
1928 – The first British Photomaton machines debuted at Selfridge’s in London, becoming an instant sensation.
1929 – The fraud scandal involving Photomaton Parent Corporation’s director, Clarence Hatry, led to the collapse of the British Photomaton company. It became a symbol of overvalued speculation, while photographers’ unions accused the booths of being unfair competition.
1933 – Brighton’s Palace Pier hosted a ‘Photoweigh’ booth, which gave sitters both a miniature portrait and their weight.
1940s to ’50s – Photobooths became fixtures in public spaces, serving as a means for IDs, keepsakes, and casual portraits.
1950s-60s – With the rise of colour, booths evolved into cultural icons found across cities worldwide.
1954 – The first Photo-MeR photobooth appeared in the UK.
1970s-80s – Technological advances improved speed, colour, and durability, boosting the popularity of photobooths.
1989 – Photo-Me® International operated over 15,000 booth in 100 countries.
1994 – The first digital photobooths marked the decline of traditional analogue machines.
1995 – Japan launched purikura sticker booths, turning photography into a playful, customisable social activity.
1999 – The first International Photobooth Convention was hosted in Nottingham by Steve ‘Mixup’ Howard.
2000s – Analogue photobooths resurfaced as artistic and nostalgic mediums, while digital props and features became prevalent Photobooth.net is created by Brian Meacham and Tim Garrett.
2008 – Nakki Goranin published American Photobooth.
2011 – Raynal Pellicer published ‘Photobooth: The Art of the Automatic Portrait’, documenting the medium’s history through his own collection.
2025 – Marks 100 years of Josepho’s Photomaton studio and analogue photobooth.
Installation view of ‘Strike a Pose! 100 Years of the Photobooth’ at the Photographers’ Gallery – the frame in the middle and the display case show how these handy little photos came to be used for passports, identity cards and others forms of identification (photo by the author)
Brief history (the curators’ text)
A combined studio and photography lab in one place, photobooths offered the first affordable access to photography for the general public. With no technical knowledge needed and no operator, anyone could step behind the curtain, put their money in the slot and strike a pose.
After the success of the first booth, when over 7,500 New Yorkers used the booth in its first 5 days, global success quickly followed. The first photobooth launched in the UK in Selfridges, London, in 1928 and was an immediate hit.
In the 1950s and 1960s, photobooths were a common feature at fairs, shopping centres and train stations. These intimate inexpensive spaces gave everyone the freedom to control their own images. Behind the curtain, whether alone or crammed in with friends, the photobooth was a playground, beyond the gaze of a photographer.
The booths were loved by everyone, from John Lennon and Yoko Ono, to John and Jacqueline Kennedy, and used by artist Andy Warhol for his famous series of self-portraits. The coin-operated booths, once ever-present on high streets and stations, disappeared with the rise of digital photography in the 1990s.
However, restored by dedicated experts, analogue booths are nowadays enjoying a resurgence of interest with modern-day fans. As I mentioned, alongside the display of archive prints, vintage strips and materials, there’s also be a booth at the Gallery for visitors to create their own selfie souvenir.
What makes this doubly interesting is that upstairs, in the exhibition itself, there’s a live video feed to a mini camera installed inside the photobooth’s development machinery so you can watch photos visitors are taking of themselves being developed live. Alongside the monitor, is a technical explanation of how the booths are able to process and develop your snaps so quickly.
Installation view of ‘Strike a Pose! 100 Years of the Photobooth’ at the Photographers’ Gallery showing the live feed to inside the photobooth and accompanying technical explanation of how it works (photo by the author)
Critical reflection
The obvious thing about the booths is they give the user agency. Up to this point if you wanted a photo of yourself you had to get a photographer to take it or be lucky enough to be one of the few people who had some kind of timing device which allowed you to take a selfie with a traditional camera. Photobooths set people free to express themselves, and this was encouraged by their cheapness. For a few pennies you could have photos of you, or as many other people as you could cram into the little booth, performing and posing and larking about to your heart’s content. They became a sort of playground, up to a point…
Because the downside of these booths is that they were (and are) always installed in public places, generally very public places like train stations or (like my nearest one) in a supermarket. Not too much scope for larking about then, certainly no nudity or naughtiness. Publicly acceptable larks only – like making faces, wearing clothes you might not usually do i.e. dressing up, messing about with your hair and so on – or, as here, the large number of couples packing themselves into a booth in order to pout, kiss, and strike mutual poses, riffing off each other. Or, as most people probably used them, to take deadly dull and solemn passport photos.
Installation view of ‘Strike a Pose! 100 Years of the Photobooth’ at the Photographers’ Gallery showing the bureaucratic application of photobooth pics used in (French) identity cards (photo by the author)
Now of course, everyone in the world can take high quality selfies with their smartphones and it is estimated that over 90 million selfies are taken every day! And since these can be taken everywhere, they are and the scope of the self-portrait has exploded to cover every conceivable location and activity. If photobooths are making a modest return, as the curators suggest, maybe it’s for several reasons. One is that it represents a particular genre, like the miniatures created by Elizabethan artists, so cramped and restricted that from its limitations it evolved its own conventions.
Another more obvious reason is the ongoing fashion for retro tech, a retreat (by some people) from the glut of digital wonders now available to us, to older formats which are perceived as somehow more authentic. I’m thinking in particular of the revival of vinyl LP records and even, so I’ve read, of tape cassettes.
So there are motives of retro fashion, nostalgia, and fun involved in the revival of photobooths if, in fact, they are undergoing a revival. Although this was a little called into question by the way that, during the half hour I spent in this one-room little display, not a single person used the actual photobooth downstairs, so I never got to see the developing mechanism on the live feed in action. Sad face.
Summary
A small but fascinating slice of social history, included in admission to the larger, more significant Boris Mikhailov and Zofia Rydet exhibitions.
Related links
- Strike a Pose! 100 Years of the Photobooth continues at the Photographers’ Gallery until 22 February 2026
- The Photobooth blog
- Photobooth: The Art of the Automatic Portrait on Amazon
Books & Boots 