Behind the Photobooth

Tell us a little about Old Spitalfields Market’s new photobooth…

This Autofoto machine is a 1980’s M21 model analogue photobooth. It’s special because it has a darkroom inside which takes your picture through a complete photographic development process in just under 4 minutes, producing a unique picture quality. This machine spent many years in Chicago before making its way west towards Los Angeles and then to our London workshop where we recently restored it.

Is it one of a kind, or part of a bigger project?

These days, analogue photobooths are quite rare, as they are no longer being manufactured. When digital photography came along, many of these machines were abandoned or scrapped, and the knowledge of how to maintain them was lost. Over the last decade we have learned how to rescue and restore analogue photobooths, and our long term project is to ensure the survival of this unique medium of photography for future generations to enjoy.

How did you get into supplying photo booths?

I bought my first photobooth for the wedding of my friend Txema – we had a shared love of photography since being at school together in Barcelona. Unfortunately the booth didn’t make it to the wedding, it missed the boat! So instead it was shipped to London and our friend Jonathan, who lived in a warehouse in Seven Sisters, agreed to store it. We first installed it in a Christmas market in Somerset house and slowly learned how to service and repair it… cue a lot of trial and error and many sleepless nights dreaming of photobooth mechanisms…

Do you ever get to see people’s pictures?

The beautiful thing about analogue booths is their sense of privacy – because the image is directly exposed to the paper, there is no other copy (or negative) of the photograph. The photobooth images tend to be personal and intimate, so I don’t like the fact that digital booths can store your images on their internal hard drives. With analogue, we do sometimes find a lost photostrip due to a mechanical malfunction, or people leaving their photo behind. I try my best to find the owner(s) of these images but over the years we have accumulated a little collection of lost photo strips. One day it would be great to organise a call out to reunite them with their owners.

What’s the most interesting story your photo booths have inspired?

There are so many to tell I wouldn’t know where to start! I know about people proposing in the booth, between flashes, to capture the moment of surprise. But the most interesting stories I think involve identity – I recently heard about someone capturing their gender transition journey within the intimacy of the booth. I suppose the photographer-less portrait creates a space and a freedom that allows people to feel at ease to explore something essential of themselves – a mood, a spirit or vibe.

Why do you think people still love photo booths so much in an age of camera phones and digital photography?

Because we are saturated with digital pictures and cannot keep up with managing them! At least for me, they get lost in the Cloud and I hardly ever look at them weeks after they were made. I think that people love the quality, physicality and authenticity of the analogue photobooth strip, and the fact that the format has not changed for 100 years. In fact, the machine at Spitalfields will produce the same quality of photograph that the Surrealists made with their collective portrait in the twenties, and Andy Warhol made with Candy Darling and Edie Sedgewick at The Factory in the seventies, because it uses the very same technology. I also think that the first flash usually comes as a surprise and this makes for spontaneous and off guard photos which have a unexpected magic – especially in a context where people are used to having so much control of their image.

 

You’ll find the Old Spitalfields Market photobooth in the Brushfield Street gate to the Market, by 65a Brushfield Street.

Learn more about Autofoto at autofoto.org .