When Dominique Manning gets her picture taken, she likes to review the results immediately. Last Friday, she had to wait three-and-a-half minutes.
The 26-year-old from Philly was in town for a concert, but made a point of stopping at Autophoto, a museum dedicated to photo booths that has attracted lines around the block since it opened on Oct. 11.
A few poses and $8 later, the 20th-century Photo-Me Model 21 emitted a whirring sound, and a strip of four photos fell out of its delivery slot.
“Whoa, it’s like, hot!” Manning said. “It looks great, I love it. As a person of color, with film, you never know what you’re going to look like, but I like it. You can see my face.”
Autophoto’s founder, Bre Conley Saxon, stood beaming a few feet away.
“We took a gamble that people would care, and they do,” she said. “Every day, I’m smiling when I go to bed.”
The new museum combines seven working booths with an archival collection of rare prints, ephemera and equipment, including the original camera used by inventor Anatol Josepho, who debuted the first automated photo booth in Manhattan a century ago.
It arrives at a time when the survival of analog photo booths is anything but guaranteed. A few years ago, Conley Saxon said, the entire medium nearly vanished when the war in Ukraine severed access to its most essential materials.
Lines for Autophoto have wrapped around the block since opening day.
Autophoto’s booths span decades and styles. One wide-format machine, which prints photographs double the size of normal photo strips, was manufactured for just a single year. Another mimics the photo booth from MTV’s “Total Request Live.” A Polaroid booth — once common, now nearly extinct — shares space with the earliest digital-to-print hybrids. Visitors can choose their booth, pose, and wait a few minutes for their uneditable results.
Ali Clark, who helped develop Autophoto’s public rollout, said Josepho’s invention was the first to let people be themselves in front of the camera.
“In the early 1900s, you went into a photographer’s studio and sat very still, very quietly, and the images are really stiff because of that,” she said. “When you step into a photo booth, you can close the curtain, you can be silly, you can kiss your sweetheart. It’s just a magical moment.”
Most people in the crowded room last Friday appeared to be in their early 20s. But Conley Saxon and Clark said the museum has attracted a wide range of visitors, from families and longtime collectors to older visitors recreating strips they’d taken decades earlier.
“You’re your own photographer,” Conley Saxon said. “The original selfie is the photo booth.”
There’s something so special about a photo booth photo.
The ability to step inside a machine that takes your picture was introduced in 1925, when Russian-born Josepho installed the first fully automatic photo booth in Times Square. For 25 cents, New Yorkers could pose for a strip of eight photos and receive them in about eight minutes.
Josepho called it the “Photomaton.” Within six months, it was drawing 1,500 people a day, as recounted by the New York Times in 2008. Two years after the Photomaton’s rollout, Josepho sold his stake in the company for $1 million ($18.7 million today) and a young Franklin Delano Roosevelt joined the board, the Times reported. Josepho, a socialist, immediately pledged $500,000 to philanthropy. Photo booths became fixtures in bus stations, boardwalks and department stores for decades to come.
The 1940s-era “Model 9” was the first commercial photo booth to use the soon common “dip and dunk” chemical process.
Today, a labyrinth of wires, pulleys and timers from Josepho’s original camera mechanism is on display at Autophoto, loaned to the museum by his descendants.
For Conley Saxon, that object is both a relic and rallying cry. The former wedding photographer found her first analog booth in a thrift store in Alabama, fell in love with the technology and spent the next decade restoring machines, sourcing hard-to-find parts and shipping booths around the country.
Soon, Conley Saxon had a network of working booths in bars, venues and vintage shops from Seattle to Atlanta. But she envisioned something more ambitious: a space not just to use the machines, but to understand them, with all their quirks, and history, and threat of extinction.
Visitors to Autophoto can get a map of working analog photo booths around the city, created by photo booth technician Danielle Iliria. The museum also offers a "passport" for people to mark and collect stamps when they visit the locations.
Photo booths use direct-positive photo paper, which creates an image directly without the use of a negative. But for decades, Conley Saxon said, the only factories producing the paper were located in Russia. The war in Ukraine disrupted the global supply.
“A lot of us thought that was it for analog,” Conley Saxon said.
Instead, she and other technicians began testing substitutes from manufacturers like Ilford, hand-cutting photo paper into the right size in complete darkness, or working with decades-old stock they’d kept in storage. Their collective scramble kept the machines running, Conley Saxon said, and cleared the path for Autophoto to exist.
She chose the location to be close to the Tenement Museum and International Center of Photography, and to honor Josepho’s Russian Jewish immigrant heritage. And her timing helped. Just days before Autophoto’s opening, Saxon co-hosted the International Photobooth Convention there, showcasing machines from more than a dozen countries.
Ethan Eben and Isa Nassery took photos at every booth in the museum.
Only in New York could two analog photo booths go viral within a block of each other.
On Allen Street, a standalone machine known as Old Friend Photobooth has drawn its own dedicated crowd since opening last year. Ethan Eben, who visited Autophoto with his partner Isa Nassery, had thought he was visiting Old Friend.
The couple was trying every booth in the museum, practicing poses that would differentiate each shot from another.
Nassery pulled out the first photo booth strip they ever took together, during a trip to Spain last year.
“I’ve kept it in my pocket for a year,” she said. Eben pointed out that he was striking the same pose a year ago. “You can see I didn’t really learn that much,” he said.
“There’s something so special about a photo booth photo,” Nassery said. “It’s one and done.”
Correction: This story has been updated to credit Danielle Iliria as the creator of the photo booth map.
