My last international trip of 2022 meant one more opportunity to catch up with photobooth friends in another European city, this time London.
After the disappointment of the cancelled 2020 Photobooth Convention, it was great to see Marco and Rafa again, and catch up the growing photobooth scene in the capital.
I started things off on the right foot when I discovered that I’d booked a hotel that looked directly out on one of Autofoto’s locations, the Dillons Cafe at the Waterstones on Gower Street. My flight landed at 8 am and by 10, I was in the booth taking a strip of photos.
The next day, I met Marco and Rafa at Coal Drops Yard to check out another of their booths, which was in use when we stopped by (something that happened with almost every booth I visited on this trip). We took a few strips, of course, to document the occasion.
It was great to see them, and to hear about all the work they’ve been doing over the past few years to make London a true photobooth capital of the world. We talked about technical issues, the Russian paper crisis, and of course, the upcoming International Photobooth Convention which was in the works when we talked and has since been officially announced. More on that later…
Marco and I visited the Standard nearby, and I took some strips in the beautiful booth located on the ground floor inside Double Standard, the hotel’s bar and restaurant.
Over the course of my stay in London, I visited two more booths, at the Hoxton Holborn, which had been switched out for a different booth from the one we had previously listed, and the booth at Kingly Court, which was perhaps the most mobbed photobooth I’ve ever seen outside a convention setting.
Rafa and Marco are certainly doing something right, as they’ve found combination of image quality, reliability, and location that make their machines not only popular but beloved. It’s certainly a far cry from my first photobooth trip to the city 20 years earlier, when the last of the analog machines were being removed and and my fiancée and I went on a forced march in the rain to find one of the last existing machines in the wild in a Sainsbury’s in Fulham.
Hungarian archivist and historian János Mátyás Balogh let us know about a short essay he wrote on Anatol Josepho for the Hungarian National Archives. The essay is an abstract of a longer article he had previously written (in Hungarian). Later, Hungary’s largest newspaper wrote a piece about his research (also in Hungarian). All three pieces stem from János’s original research which included communications with the Josepho family.
