2025: 100 years of the analogue photobooth

In 1925, 100 years ago, Anatol Josepho invented the first fully automated, coin-operated photobooth which he named the Photomaton. Stationed on Broadway near Times Square in New York City, over 250,000 Americans used the photobooth in its first year, paying 25 cents and waiting patiently for eight minutes while their photo strips developed. A game-changer for the world of photography, the photobooth would become ubiquitous in cities around the world. In the 1950s and 1960s, photobooths became a common feature at fairs, shopping centres and train stations and were loved by everyone from John Lennon and Yoko Ono to John and Jaqueline Kennedy and even employed by artist Andy Warhol for his now famous series of self-portraits.

Fast forward to 2025 and AUTOFOTO is marking the booth’s 100 year anniversary with a series of globally connected events, profiles and celebrations including major exhibitions and interventions across London and New York, projects with community groups, artists and designers, plus special events centered around their London and Barcelona based booths and in partnership with colleagues across the Globe.

AUTOFOTO’s operation has grown out of long standing friendships and a shared obsession for analogue photobooths, founded in 2009 by Rafael Hortala Vallve and now working with a team including Creative Director Corinne Quin.


They have been rescuing and restoring original auto-photography machines for over a decade. Their restored machines can be found in locations across their two city bases (London and Barcelona) where they make them available for people to experience and enjoy. Most recently they helped to establish Scotland’s only analogue photobooth stationed at Stills Centre for Photography in Edinburgh. Their mission to find contemporary spaces for the analogue booths has helped see a resurgence of the photobooth in public spaces and in public art, marking AUTOFOTO at the forefront of the analogue photobooth community.

To mark the 100th anniversary of the analogue photobooth they have worked up a programme of events to highlight the lasting impact, to share the invaluable knowledge of restoration and to celebrate the modern day allure of the photobooth.

Kicking off spring 2025 at London’s Spitalfields Market there will be a showcase of the Real Selfie Project, a project that shares stories and self-portraits from an analogue photobooth and the event will include market traders, exhibition spotlights and interviews.



As part of the project at Spitalfield Market, there will be portraits of the local Market Traders and their wares captured in the photobooth along with interviews to gather stories and reflections on market life. The general public will also be invited to come and take an original analogue selfie as part of this event, taking place at the end of April.

To celebrate the centenary Autofoto are working with artists, designers and photographers to commission new work using the photobooth as an artistic tool. Current collaborations-in-progress include artist Paul Elliman, who asked friends to perform letters in the booth for My Alphabet in the 1990’s; Designer Michael Marriott who has previously made work with inner workings of automobiles; and photographer Jenny Lewis who is exploring the relationship between the Auto-photo and auto-immune disease through a series of intergenerational portraits.

AUTOFOTO will be representing all things photobooth at the internationally renowned photography fair, Photo London during the week of 15-18 May with details of their participation announced in line with Photo London’s programming later in the season.


Going international, AUTOFOTO are also looking forward to sharing their invaluable photobooth restoration knowledge and current 2025 projects with photography lovers and experts from around the world at Arles photography festival (7 July - 28 September) and New York’s International Photobooth Convention (28-31 August).

In May, there will be an exclusive screening and accumulation of a community project at Rio Cinema - a beautiful independent and community run 1930's art deco picture palace at the heart of Dalston in Hackney. Autofoto will also be launching a short by filmmaker Nick Francis (Speakit.org), filmed across London and Barcelona, following a day in the life of AUTOFOTO and giving an insight into the inner workings of analogue booths (screenings dates/locations to be announced shortly).

In June, they will be celebrating all things love and inclusivity in the booth with a very special LGBTQ engagement programme in conjunction with Ramsgate and Karen Vost. ‘The Love Booth’ is a pilot project celebrating the analogue photobooth as a vehicle for love and social connection, while also exploring the power of photography to encourage storytelling and as a means of evoking memories. The project will connect past and present through spotlighting photobooth images from past historical eras alongside photographs taken during the project with community groups and the public.

In autumn, The Photographers’ Gallery in London will celebrate the anniversary with an exhibition highlighting the history of the photobooth and some of its photographer fans through the decades. There’ll also be a booth on site at the central London gallery for everyone to create their own selfie souvenir to take home.


Rafael Hortala Vallve, AUTOFOTO founder and analogue photobooth expert, says: ‘AUTOFOTO is a project that seeks to rescue, restore, and situate vintage, analogue photobooths across the U.K. as well as helping to build connections globally with fellow photobooth enthusiasts and experts. This 100 year anniversary offers the perfect platform to celebrate the important history and contemporary relevance of the analogue photobooth and we are looking forward to showcasing the cultural significance, the community connections and the world-wide appeal of the analogue photobooth for photography lovers, novices and photobooth enthusiasts across the world.’

We asked him a few questions:

All About Photo: What initially sparked your passion for analogue photobooths, and how did that lead to the creation of AUTOFOTO in 2009?

Rafael Hortala Vallve: I’ve always loved photography. I’ve got quite a bad memory, so taking photographs allowed me to capture moments before I would forget them. As a teenager, I would take portraits of my classmates, I had a darkroom in the bathroom at home… and at the same time I was racing off road motorbikes and had a real fascination for mechanics of these machines… so I guess in a way these interests came together in the photobooth, which is essentially a mechanical darkroom. I wanted to set up a booth for our friends wedding in Barcelona, and this involved tracking down a machine, and learning how it operated chemically and mechanically, which allowed me to build on some of my basic knowledge in order to make it work. It was an exciting process that involved a lot of trial and error! Autofoto came a few years later, starting with one coin operated booth, which earned enough to buy another two booths – which has led us to where we are today.

What is it about analogue photobooths that makes them so unique compared to digital alternatives?

For sure there are many digital booths out there, and they’re fun! I suppose analogue booths are markedly different in that they are much more rare, and with this you have an authenticity and story behind them. As 20th Century objects, they’ve lived in many different contexts. For example, our booth at Battersea Power station spent many years in an Alaskan prison, where it was used to take mugshots of inmates. It might be Europes oldest working analogue photobooth – and it works perfectly and delivers photos at the exact same quality as the day it was made. The process has not changed - the image is exposed direct to paper, and reversed chemically – there are no negatives. I think in an age of digital excess and privacy concerns, having a physical photograph with no other copy is quite a special and rare thing.

Over the years, what has been the biggest challenge in rescuing and restoring these machines?

Initially it was understanding how they worked, because when I first got a booth we were working off a 10 minute explanation from Geoff who we bought it from, and the rest we had to figure out. At the time, the analogue photobooth community was small, and there weren’t many people to share knowledge with.

Finding parts was a challenge – because many booths came from the USA and Canada, the electricity conversion was a challenge, as the UK system was different. When it comes to mechanical parts, the booths worked on imperial measurements (bolts, nuts etc), which was difficult to source in the UK now w’ere metric. Our biggest challenge has been the flashes, understanding how they work, understanding why they fail (ie. bad connections in the cables, connectors etc), and understanding voltage. We’ve worked with a friend who has helped us redesign the unit that accumulates the voltage and releases it to the flashbulbs, and this has been a long journey of development and learning!

The photobooth has an incredible history dating back to 1925. Why do you think it has remained relevant for a century?

The photobooth has been critical in popularlising portraiture with everyday pepole, during a time where taking a photograph involved visiting a studio and a photogorapher which not everyone could afford. The interesting thing is that it was both a tool of state image making – ie. it provided the means to take standardised ID pictures for passports, or prison mugshots as mentioned above; but also a tool of personal portraiture, providing a safe private space for people to make a photo with a loved one, or alone, without any judgment and at low cost. The versatility of use, and ease of the process made it accessible to many different people. Of course, today we can take photos at will on our phones – however, I still think that people desire the materiality of the physical photograph, and in this sense the photostrip has endured.

AUTOFOTO has planned a range of events across London, New York, and Arles to celebrate this milestone. What are you most excited about?

The photobooth has a long history of creative use, beyond the portrait. This year we are working with artists, designers and photographers to use the photobooth as a tool within their practice, and we’re really excited about the results of this – watch this space! We will also have a booth at The Photographers Gallery in London, as part of an exhibition in Autumn 2025 to coincide with the centenary of the invention of the booth, this year.

How do you see the role of photobooths evolving in today's digital age, where photography is more accessible than ever?

Precisely because digital pictures are more present than ever, people are looking for new things – things that are not the norm. For the younger generation photobooths are a novelty, where you have to wait for the image, where you have less control. We imagine this is really refreshing in a culture where people are very controlled and curated about how they appear in an image. It represents a freedom from this, I think, being in a standardised format.

Many of your projects highlight community engagement, such as The Love Booth and collaborations with artists. Why is this social and artistic dimension important to AUTOFOTO?

We didn’t set out to be a business, Autofoto really started as a passion project. We both teach at university, so for a long time Autofoto was a side gig. The mission has always been to preserve this form of photography for future generations. We started out with one booth, then got a couple more as we learned to fully restore and make them work, mainly for the purpose of making them accessible, thereby ensuring their survival. The photobooth has a rich history in visual culture, and we saw the importance of this in ditital age, to capture current lives and current ideas. We run community projects to capture groups of people who may not know about the photobooth, (from pensioners to schoolkids), and also work with artists to continue the experimental tradition of artists using the booth as a tool for creative practice. This is really important to us.

How do you approach selecting artists and designers to collaborate with on photobooth-related projects?

That’s a good question – we are within a network of artists and designers, within our work but also in our location, in Hackney, where there are a lot of studios and creative communities. Sometimes we are approached by artists who want to work with the booth, and we in general consider anyone who wants to put an idea forward to make work using this format.

Restoring vintage photobooths requires a mix of technical expertise and dedication. What does the restoration process typically involve? With so few analogue photobooths remaining worldwide, do you see a risk of losing the knowledge required to maintain them?

This risk may have existed in the early 200’s, where operators were getting rid of their analogue booths because ditital was ‘the future’. At that time there was really the risk of the knowledge disappearing, and you can see this with the death of Polaroid and other analogue photography operators. But there were a few operators in the US and Europe who held on, kind of because of their passion for the machines, who kept them alive, and thanks to this they have been able to pass this knowledge on. Connecting online and through social media in the last 7-8 years, different analogue photobooth operators have come together to form a community of knowledge, and in general most of us are sharing and helping newcomers to learn and troubleshoot. In August we’ll be gathering at the International PHotooboth Convention in New York to continue sharing and connecting in this way.

Beyond the centennial celebrations, what are AUTOFOTO’s long-term ambitions?

Long term, we’d like the booths to be working for decades to come. Of course there are things that can be optimised, which would make the machines more reliable and more mobile, which we’re working on.

You’ve successfully reintroduced photobooths into public spaces and artistic projects. Where would you love to see a restored booth next?

We’d love to put an analogue booth in a central London train station, as these are perhaps the most typical spaces you’d find a photobooth in the past. Train stations are places ideal for a memento… of greetings, goodbyes and souvenirs. almost every train station has a digital booth now, but the purpose of these machines (primarily for ID photos) is very different in nature to our analogue booths.


AUTOFOTO
AUTOFOTO are analogue photobooth experts based in London and Barcelona who have been rescuing and restoring original auto-photography machines for over a decade. Their restored machines can be found in locations across our two city bases where they make them available for people to experience and enjoy.

The coin-operated booths, which were once ever-present in shops and stations across the globe, are quickly disappearing with only a handful left in the world, and an even smaller community of people who can fix and maintain them. AUTOFOTO’s mission is to ensure the survival of these beautiful machines and this unique medium of photography for future generations. Through careful restoration and servicing, they seek to preserve both the photobooths and the knowledge of how they work.

In 2018 AUTOFOTO set up a workshop & studio in East London. They were joined by Corinne Quin who designed the space and now curates events and creative collaborations around the photobooth. Through patience, ever expanding electrical and mechanical knowledge, and great attention to detail, they ensure that the booths continue to capture spontaneous and beautiful portraits for years to come.
autofoto.org
@autofoto.london