You Should Know that Vancouver is the Photo Booth Capital of Canada
by Christine Hagemoen, Scout, 8/20/2025 | WEBSITE |
As a lover of all things analogue, I’m happy to share that this year marks the 100th anniversary of the analogue photo booth. Time to celebrate and get snap happy!
And who do we have to thank for inventing the photo booth a full century ago? That would be Anatol Josepho with his Photomaton — an automatic photography machine that operated “on the principle of a vending machine”. Anatol Josepho built and patented the first fully functioning Photomaton photo booth in 1925. When Josepho’s photo booth first appeared at 1659 Broadway in New York City, it was an instant success. In the first six months after the booth was installed, over 280,000 people had used it.
His is a real rags-to-riches, “American Dream” type story. Josepho, originally from Tomsk, Russia, was working as an itinerant photographer in Europe in the early 1920s when he had the idea for a “coin-in-the-slot machine which would automatically photograph the sitter, develop the photographs, dry them, and deliver them”. According to the New York Times (March 27, 1927), Josepho was “certain that he had a commercially viable idea, [so] he came to the United States to develop the first machine”. Two years after launching his new invention, Josepho sold his interest in Photomaton Company to a group of businessmen, headed by Henry Morganthau Sr., for $1 million and guaranteed future royalties for his invention.
Josepho’s Photomaton was a coin-operated (25 cents) kiosk which used an automated camera to shoot the positive image directly onto sensitized photo paper, then using a chemical dip-and-dunk method to process it inside the booth, and finally delivering the unique photo strip to the user. One hundred years later, essentially the same system is still used in analogue photo booths today.
Like Kodak’s Brownie Camera, which put photography into the hands of the everyday amateur photographer, the photo booth intended “to make personal photography easily and cheaply available to the masses” and even take that accessibility one step further by eliminating photographic variables like composition and lighting. All the photo booth sitter had to do was put money in and pose.
The privacy curtain was added a little later in the life cycle of the photo booth, thus making it a true booth. The curtain lets customers create their photos in privacy and with discretion. This allows freedom of expression that contemporary societal customs may not permit — what happens in the booth, stays in the booth.
Ubiquitous for the remainder of the 20th century, chemical photo booths occupied public spaces – train stations, bus depots, airports, malls — giving people all over the world the opportunity to quickly take inexpensive, quality portraits.
However, starting just after the turn of the 21st century, these machines started to rapidly disappear, causing an eclectic group of individuals from around the world to come together and respond. Today, there is a worldwide network/movement of photo booth aficionados, artists, and operators. Thanks to them, people of all ages in cities worldwide are enjoying a photo booth renaissance.
Digital photography may have almost killed the analogue photo booth (and all photo-chemical processes, for that matter) but it survives today. In fact, in Vancouver it thrives! Thanks to the work of professional photographer Ian Azariah and Phototronic, Vancouver is the photo booth capital of Canada.
Phototronic began in 2017 when Azariah noticed that all the chemical analogue photo booths were disappearing simultaneously all over the world. Rather than mourn their loss, Azariah and his team started purchasing booths and figuring out how to keep them running. They also build new booths based on traditional models. He wanted to make sure that the photo booth culture remain strong within Vancouver because it had “flat-lined”.
Azariah is familiar with reviving older analogue photographic processes; he is also the person behind the Tin Type Trike – a custom built darkroom on a tricycle made specifically for the 1860’s photographic process know as the tintype.
I was lucky enough to meet with Azariah in his studio/workshop in East Vancouver, where they were in the middle of building a new booth cabinet. The booth is based on the design of the classic model 11, with its mid-century modern curved corners.
In this digital age of ours, Azariah believes it is important that people have “hard copy memories of their lives.” Photo booth photo strips can provide that hard copy memory. “I mean, it’s lovely to have a million photos on your phone”, continues Azariah, “but it’s so important to have a couple that are real.”
He believes we’ve changed our relationship with images, in that, with digital images you think of an event or memory and then find the photographic proof of the memory on your phone. “But it’s a different relationship that our minds have when seeing physical photographs,” Azariah explains. “When we see physical photographs pinned to a wall, we aren’t thinking of the memory, we see the photograph, and it draws the memory to us; and it sort of creates this interesting, random memory recall that’s so special.” He appreciates that he can make a living “providing people with a simple and beautiful way to have those physical hard copy memories for them to go through.”
Azariah is very passionate about his work. He told me that he loves “the process of photography… the purity of a perfectly exposed silver gelatin image is so breathtaking and so timeless.” And for him, there’s “something special about light-based emulsion and capturing images in this sort of true silver capture way.”
Maintaining a photo-chemical booth is certainly more difficult than a digital one, but for Azariah it’s worth it. His favourite images are those he makes after changing a roll of light sensitive paper, where one has to burn through some of the paper to get it through the gate to load. He explained that he has to go through about two test strips to clear it into unexposed paper, ready for customer use. “But my favourite strips are always the ones where it’s like a fade [from white into the visible image frame]. They’re all just very unique; you don’t know what’s going to happen.”
When I asked Azariah which he preferred, analogue or digital, he said “Oh yeah, it’s going to be analogue…it’s where my passion lives. Obviously, I operate both types of booth because that is what the client wants and [with the] different locations, it just makes more sense. More than anything, I’m obsessed with customer experience, and analogue, digital, those are just nuances to an experience.”
Phototronic treats their digital booths in such a way as to “pay homage to the original experience.” Azariah builds custom digital cabinets that keep the true spirit of the classic photo booth. It’s just the output and the internal mechanism that are different.
How does Azariah stay inspired in his quest to keep photo booths alive? By connecting with a small worldwide group of booth aficionados/operators that have become his friends. “The whole community of us are very tight and we all know each other,” he says. “Thanks to the internet we were able to all find each other.” The reason they came together in the first place was because they ran out of paper worldwide for the booths, which was only manufactured in Russia at the time. So, they all had to work together to find a solution.
Azariah told me about a “phenomenal” book that two friends of his (Christopher Sutherland and Jessie Norman, of Metro-Auto-Photo) made, Auto-Photo: A Life in Portraits (Perimeter Editions). It documents the life of Alan Alder, who maintained and operated photo booths in Melbourne for more than 50 years. The images in the book are from the test strips they found and collected of him from just maintaining all the photo booths. Earlier this summer, Alder’s life work was celebrated in an exhibition with the same name at RMIT Melbourne. The story of Alan Alder immediately reminded me of the delightful 2001 film Amélie, where one of the subplots of the film is the mystery of the photo booth man (see videoclip below). Learn more about the life of Alan Alder in this ABC News (Australia) article by Mel Fulton.
Over the last one hundred years booth designs have changed and evolved, but the overall photo booth experience has changed little. Only the subjects are the ones that change. Photo booth aficionados believe “there is a particular charm to its inherent simplicity and repetition”. The best part is that you get a tangible reminder of your experience, of that fleeting moment in time.
To celebrate 100 years of booth culture, run, don’t walk, to one of the Phototronic booths found all over Metro Vancouver. Azariah operates analogue booths in Vancouver at Hero’s Welcome, The American, and Slice of Life Gallery (3!); with digital booths to be found at the Vancouver Art Gallery, The Polygon Gallery (North Vancouver), Gore Street Vintage, Funk Coffee Bar, Hotel Belmont, House of Funk Brewing (North Vancouver), and Amble Coffee (Chilliwack).
To learn more the history of photo booths past and present, and about booth culture, Azariah recommends you check out the following titles:
Photobooth: A Biography by Meags Fitzgerald (Conundrum Press, 2013) – This graphic novel gives an excellent history of the photo booth and also Fitzgerald’s own journey with photo booths. According to Azariah, Fitzgerald “is one of the coolest photo booth artists and she’s Canadian”.
American Photobooth (W.W. Norton & Co., 2008) — This book by artist Näkki Goranin uncovers the technological and commercial history of the automatic photo booth, as well as the social context in which it was developed. In addition, the book provides a trove of mesmerizing photo booth images she has collected over the years.
Contributed by Brian
