The charm of photo booths: step inside, close the curtain, wait for the print

There is a red curtain hanging in front of a peeling wall in the center of Florence. Above it, a painted cherub stares at you with wide eyes. Inside, there is a chair, a cold light, and a machine that never lies.

Fotoautomatica is one of those analog photo booths that have survived everything—digital cameras, smartphones, Instagram filters—and that today, inexplicably, create a line. Not of tourists looking for souvenirs. Of twenty-somethings who go in alone or in pairs and come out happy, clutching a damp strip of paper with four versions of themselves.

No retouching. No second attempts. Just that.

PHOTO unsplash Kevin Grieve

Time returns

The automatic photo booth is exactly 100 years old. It was invented by Anatol Josepho, a Russian immigrant who arrived in New York with one idea in mind: to allow anyone to take their own photo without the need for a photographer. It was 1925, and his Photomaton, 25 cents for eight shots developed in ten minutes, had people queuing for weeks outside the Broadway store where it was first installed.

A century later, the queue is still there. Only those waiting have changed.

London, Brooklyn, Milan

In London, in underground stations and Brick Lane markets, Photomatic booths are manned every weekend by young people in oversized jackets and platform shoes. In Brooklyn, the Old Friend (a photo booth bar in the heart of Williamsburg) has become a pilgrimage destination for those who want an evening without screens but with something to take home. In Milan, in the corridors of certain clubs in the Naviglio district, booths appear for hire at weekends: they run out of film in a matter of hours.

It's not vintage by chance. It's a deliberate choice.

Why right now?

We live immersed in images that never end. Every day, every hour, every scroll. Perfect photos, perfect bodies, perfect sunsets, many of which have never even been seen by human eyes, only generated by an algorithm. In this endless, polished stream, a grainy, overexposed photo, with eyes half-closed because of the flash, becomes something rare: proof that that moment really existed.

Gen Z knows this. And seeks it out.

Entering a photo booth means accepting someone else's rules. You can't choose the lighting. You can't change the framing. You can only sit down, look at the lens (or not look at it) and wait. It's a small surrender, and in that surrender there is something deeply liberating for a generation accustomed to controlling every pixel of their public image.

The paradox of the post

The most beautiful and contradictory thing is that those strips of paper still end up on Instagram. The analog photo, torn from the still-warm door, is photographed with a smartphone and posted within minutes. The circle is complete, but something in the middle has changed.

Because before becoming content, that photo was an experience. There was a closed curtain, laughter, a moment of shared anticipation. There was a physical object to hold in your hand, to carry in your wallet, to stick on your bedroom mirror. The post is forgotten in twenty-four hours. The strip of paper is not.

What remains

Perhaps that's the point. In an age where everything is reproducible, modifiable, erasable, the photo booth offers something that seems almost subversive: the irreversible. What has been, has been. That grimace, that awkward light, that moment when you weren't quite ready — they remain there, printed, forever.

Anatol Josepho wanted to democratize portraiture. He succeeded so well that his camera has survived a whole century unscathed, and today it waits for someone to come in, close the curtain, and wait for the flash.

Zoe Laz/Instagram; Old Friend Photo Booth/Instagram

Brandon Minton (left) and Zoë Lazerson at Old Friend photobooth in New York City