— Blog · History —
The photobooth is one of the most enduring photographic formats of the 20th and 21st centuries. From Anatol Josepho's 1925 Photomaton on Broadway to the modern revival of vintage photobooth aesthetics in apps like Roll Booth, the photobooth has survived every major technological shift while keeping its essential character intact. This complete history covers a hundred years of photobooths — the invention, the boom, the decline, the revival, and where the format is heading next.
To understand why the photobooth was such a revolutionary invention, you have to understand what came before it. In 1925, getting a portrait photograph required:
Portrait photography was a service for the middle and upper class. Working-class people rarely had portraits taken of themselves. Family photo albums were sparse. There was no quick, cheap way to capture an image of yourself for any reason.
This was the gap that Anatol Josepho saw.
Anatol Marco Josephewitz — later anglicized to Anatol Josepho — was born in Omsk, Siberia, in 1894. He emigrated, worked as a portrait photographer in Shanghai and Manila, and arrived in New York in 1923 with a single obsession: an automated portrait machine.
By 1925, after years of prototyping, Josepho opened the first Photomaton at 1659 Broadway in New York City. The machine was unlike anything that had existed before:
The whole experience cost 25 cents and took under 10 minutes — compared to a typical $2 studio portrait that took days. People lined up around the block. The first Photomaton reportedly served 280,000 customers in its first six months.
In 1927, Josepho sold the Photomaton patent and his American operations for a reported one million dollars. He retired in his early thirties, having essentially invented mass-market portrait photography.
Understanding how the original photobooth worked helps explain why the vintage photobooth aesthetic still feels so distinct today.
Inside the booth was a large-format camera with a fixed lens. The camera didn't move between exposures. Instead, the photosensitive paper inside the camera advanced between shots, with each exposure landing on a different region of the paper sheet.
After the last shot, the paper traveled on a roller mechanism through a sequence of chemical baths:
The final photo strip was a direct positive — meaning there was no negative. Just the one printed strip. This made each photobooth strip inherently irreplaceable. Lose it, and it was gone forever. This irreplaceability is a critical part of the photobooth's emotional weight.
By the 1930s, photobooths had spread across the United States and Europe. The original Photomaton company licensed the technology to operators worldwide. Competing machines emerged. Photobooths appeared in:
The format became a cultural fixture. World War II soldiers took photobooth portraits to send home before deployment. Teenagers used them on first dates. Families used them as a cheap alternative to studio portraits. Photobooths became the default way ordinary people got pictures of themselves.
This is the era that defined the classic vintage photobooth aesthetic — black-and-white, square frames, vertical strip format, curtained intimacy. Everything we recognize as "photobooth" was established in this period.
The 1960s brought the photobooth into fine art. Andy Warhol famously used Photomaton booths for his portrait commissions throughout the decade. Subjects — celebrities, friends, and self-portrait sessions — sat in standard public booths, fed in quarters, and emerged with strips Warhol then enlarged, silkscreened, and sold as art.
His 1963 series for Harper's Bazaar included strips of Ethel Scull and others. The works were radical at the time: studio photography was the prestige format for portrait art, and Warhol intentionally chose its opposite. He used the cheapest, most automated, most democratic tool available, then made fine art out of it.
After Warhol, the photobooth strip was permanently legible as an aesthetic choice. Artists from the 1970s onward — including David Hockney, Cindy Sherman, and many others — incorporated strips or strip-like sequences into their work.
The 1970s were the high-water mark for traditional photobooths. Estimates suggest there were tens of thousands of working photobooths worldwide. The standard format had matured: four black-and-white frames on a vertical strip, $0.50–$1.00 per session, 4-minute development time.
Album covers, fashion editorials, and personal scrapbooks across the Western world used photobooth strips. The format became shorthand for: youth, intimacy, candor, the texture of ordinary life.
Two forces began chipping away at the photobooth's dominance:
Polaroid had been around since the 1940s, but the 1970s and 80s brought cheaper, more accessible instant cameras. Polaroid was personal — you could take it home. Photobooths were location-bound.
By the 1980s, 1-hour color print processing was widely available. For roughly the cost of a photobooth strip, you could get an entire roll of color photographs developed. The relative value proposition of the black-and-white photobooth strip declined.
Photobooth operators began closing locations. Maintenance was expensive. Trained technicians who could repair wet-chemistry booths were retiring without successors. The wet-chemistry photobooth was slowly disappearing from public spaces.
By the early 2000s, the original analog photobooth was nearly extinct. Most operators had either closed shop or switched to digital photobooths — machines that looked similar from the outside but used digital cameras and dye-sublimation printers internally.
The digital photobooth was undeniably an improvement in some ways: faster (strips printed in seconds, not minutes), more reliable, easier to maintain. But it lost the textural character of the wet-chemistry print. Digital strips were cleaner, sharper, more color-saturated — and somehow less interesting.
For a time, it seemed the photobooth as a meaningful format would simply disappear.
Around 2010, a small but dedicated community of enthusiasts began restoring vintage chemistry-based photobooths. Studios in New York, Berlin, Tokyo, Buenos Aires, and Melbourne reopened functioning photobooths. The restoration community shared knowledge through forums, conventions, and a website called photobooth.net.
Restored vintage photobooths became destinations. People traveled across cities to use them. A single working photobooth could attract long lines on weekends. The wet-chemistry format wasn't dead — it was just rare enough to feel special.
The 2020s brought an explosion of digital recreations of the vintage photobooth aesthetic. Wedding photobooth rental services boomed (now an estimated $400M+ industry in the US alone). Smartphone apps emerged offering "photobooth filters." Browser-based tools like Roll Booth distilled the format into something anyone with an internet connection could access for free.
The interesting cultural detail: most users of digital photobooth tools never used an analog photobooth. The aesthetic carries on by reference, not by lived experience. People who never sat in a curtained Photomaton booth still recognize a photobooth strip when they see one. The visual language has outlived the original medium.
Roll Booth is part of a long tradition of automated, accessible, democratic portrait technology. We're not the original photobooth. We're not even the first digital photobooth. But we are part of the lineage that started with Anatol Josepho on Broadway in 1925.
What we share with that original Photomaton:
What's different:
The format keeps adapting. The soul of the thing stays the same.
Anatol Josepho, a Russian-born engineer, invented the modern coin-operated photobooth. The first Photomaton opened on Broadway in New York City in 1925.
1925. Earlier automated portrait machines existed but were unreliable or impractical. The 1925 Photomaton was the first commercially successful self-operated portrait machine.
25 cents in 1925 dollars (roughly $4–5 in today's money). Eight black-and-white photos in about 10 minutes total.
Several restored Photomaton-era booths still operate in major cities — notably New York, Berlin, Tokyo, and Paris. Specific locations are maintained by the global photobooth restoration community.
New wet-chemistry photobooths are no longer manufactured. The few working analog booths today are restored originals. Modern photobooths sold today are digital, even when styled to look vintage.
Several factors: Polaroid and home photography, color drugstore prints, the high maintenance cost of chemistry-based machines, and the retirement of trained technicians who could repair them.
Roll Booth is a modern, browser-based digital photobooth that recreates the vintage photobooth aesthetic without requiring a physical machine. It carries forward the core ideas of the 1925 Photomaton — self-operated, sequential frames, vertical strip output — into a format anyone with a browser can use for free. See our Roll Booth tutorial for details.
The photobooth has survived a hundred years of technological change because it tapped into something durable: the human desire for a quick, honest, accessible portrait. Every decade brings new image-capture technology that "should" replace it. Every decade, the photobooth quietly adapts and keeps going.
Roll Booth is our small contribution to that long lineage. Every strip you take with Roll Booth carries the DNA of every strip taken at every Photomaton booth since 1925 — the same vertical format, the same black-and-white look, the same impulse to capture a moment imperfectly and walk away with proof that it happened.