In a world where everyone has a camera in their pocket, Ian Donegan asks how the photo booth has remained relevant
Photo booths haven’t just been a means of getting the right sized images for passports or driving licences for a long time - they are revenue driving coin-op machines in their own right, reliably bringing revenue to the operations they are set up in.
They have gone through many phases over the decades. The first known photo machine was featured at the World’s Fair in Paris in 1889, where a photo was transferred onto a thin sheet of metal, taking about five minutes to develop. In 1925, a Russian immigrant named Anatol Josepho built a curtain-enclosed photo booth in New York City, US. After having success with his prototype, he opened a studio on Broadway that had attended photo booths where people would pay to get a strip of photos in about eight minutes.
