How people fell in love with old-school photo booths

Five days before I turned 28, I cut my long hair into a short dark bob. It had been a tumultuous year: A young family member died suddenly. The boyfriend I would have married let me down. Then my body gave out, leaving me in hospital for a week and regaining my strength from emergency surgery for many months afterwards. I felt changed — and there was only one place I wanted to commemorate the metamorphosis: behind the curtain of an old-fashioned photo booth. So, I perched on the creaky stool and smiled, having survived it all.

Photo booths were first launched into the world on the streets of New York in 1925 by Russian immigrant Anatol Josepho. The invention, which turns 100 this year, was immediately a success. Yet, despite its popularity and gorgeous film quality, the analogue booths were replaced by digital alternatives in the late 80s and, gradually, disappeared entirely. It’s only through the dedication of fans of the medium that they’ve begun to creep back onto the streets of cities including London, Paris, Barcelona and Florence over the past 10 years — much to the delight of millennials and Gen Z, who are embracing the antiques most fervently.

Twenty-six-year-old Ella Hodson was living in Montmartre, Paris when she fell in love with photo booths. There was one near her flat on Rue des Trois-Frères and each time she had a visitor or hung out with her friends in the city, she’d pull back the curtain and climb inside. Unlike an edited selfie or filtered Instagram post, she felt the snapshot authentically captured her and her friends as they were on that day, without curation or hundreds of takes. “It was just a really nice way to make a memory,” she says. “It was always dead on that road. Nobody even went down there. Every time I’ve gone back since, it’s had a huge queue outside.”

A century ago, photo booths offered everyone the chance to pose without being under the watchful eye of a photographer for the first time. “People were very enthusiastic about the idea of being free,” Taous Dahmani, curator of The Photographers’ Gallery’s Strike a Pose! 100 Years of the Photobooth exhibition tells me. “That’s why, quickly after the launch of Anatol Josepho’s Photomaton, they added the curtain — that creates privacy.” Behind the drawn fabric. In the US, before the Civil Rights Act of 1964, photo booths never enforced segregation. “It was a truly democratic invention,” Dahmani says.

Kirsty McKenzie, a 33-year-old writer living in Barcelona, fell for the charm of photo booths after seeing pictures of her grandparents posing in one when they were young. “It feels quite raw,” she says. “There’s something sweet about putting the coin in, waiting a little, the excitement of getting your photos out. That delayed gratification.” When McKenzie visited Florence (one of the most TikTok viral booths is on Via Santa Monaca) she suggested to her parents and brother that they follow in her grandparents’ footsteps: “They all laughed at me and said ‘don’t you have a phone’. (But I) dragged them all over town to find one. Me and my mum got in. It’s just the perfect way to capture a moment. It’s candid. Freeing.”

Like many of the women I speak to, McKenzie has posed in a photo booth by herself multiple times, particularly in San Sebastian when she’s taken trips there alone. “It’s the reverse of sending a postcard. It’s something just for me to honour that moment,” she reflects. Dahmani notes that younger generations might prefer getting in a photo booth over asking a stranger to take their picture on holiday, because “in a way the photo booth was the ancestor of the selfie”. She adds: “There’s complete agency over what’s happening, but there’s also a sense of losing control — you might get surprised by the flash, there could be a blur. That’s exciting.”

Many young people also use photo booths to mark big life events. Thirty-year-old Annabel Nugent pulled her boyfriend of 10 years inside an old-school photo booth when he proposed to her in Sardinia in 2023. The photos show them grinning, hugging cheek to cheek. “Engagement announcements can be quite a lot of pressure,” Nugent reflects. “How do you choose which perfect picture to post?! This took away some of that choice. It was simple. I love the photos. It takes me back to just being so incredibly happy and in love, which I still am!”

Like me, 30-year-old Sawyer Wilson has used photo booths to mark the passing of time. She likes their immediacy, their authenticity, and the thrill you get from the experience. Last year, she was marched to a machine in Barcelona by a friend who wanted her to commemorate her birthday. “I thought that was so thoughtful and sweet and now I look back on that strip of photos and am like, ‘oh, that’s 2024’” she says of the images that see her beaming and sticking her tongue out at the lens “That photo strip feels really special,” she says. ‘I had a really nice day with my friend. I was really happy to be turning 29. It’s nice to look back on that.”

Hodson accidentally took this cataloguing one step further last year when she visited Berlin alone and realised she’d accidentally posed in a booth she’d already visited years before. In the first strip from 2018, long messy hair falls over her shoulders, a white T-shirt crinkles over her collarbones. The images are black and white — but you can tell it’s summer. In the second from late 2024, she’s bundled in a dark roll-neck jumper, hair cropped, somehow more at ease in her body. “It was a full circle moment six years apart,” she says. “It makes me feel like I’ve grown up so much — but the person who I was when I was younger is still inside of me.”

Going in a photo booth used to be cheap. We’re talking 25 cents (19 pence) when the invention first launched in the 1920s. Cut to 2025, and a strip from an analogue film machine in London will set you back up to £7. A huge jump. Yet, in a time when the cost of living is crippling, the popularity of photo booths still continues to grow among cash-strapped Gen Zs and Millennials. “Even during the Great Depression in the US, people were still going to photo booths,” Dahmani says. “It’s like a history of commerce and capital. Each time the world’s economy has collapsed, the photo booth’s economy goes up. It goes against all assumptions.”

When life is sad or uncertain, we need to feel love. That’s, arguably, the time we crave silliness and joy most. Photo booths, with their antique charm, curtained privacy and non-judgemental gaze, offer us the opportunity to experience delight for just a few pounds. Looking through the images included in Dahmani’s exhibition, which tracks back as far as 1927, it’s affecting to see how those living their lives a century ago behaved just like us. Through the upheaval and the hardship, people are still just people. We still need to kiss, and smile, and wear a funny hat. Strike a Pose! 100 Years of the Photobooth is at The Photographers’ Gallery from 10 October until 22 February.