A Love Letter to Photobooths
by Avin Dabiri, Honi Soit, 9/2/2025 | WEBSITE |
In a machine age, I still find myself caught between a curtain and a flash.
I have 22,186 photos on my phone. I’m in 7,149 of them (self-obsessed, I know). Countless versions of me: smiling softly, posing, happy. And I do love my phone camera; it’s efficient, practical, and helps me capture the world around me or photograph fleeting moments between me and my friends. But the thousands upon thousands of pixels I scroll through are foreign sometimes; curated moments that look polished but feel strangely hollow.
This is why I find comfort in photobooths. They don’t let you perform, capturing a moment swiftly and in its purest form. There’s no manipulation, no filters, no retakes. It’s just you and the box; flashes that catch you as you are, not how you want to be. And minutes later you hold a strip in your hands, reflecting that moment eternally. The ink and machinery create a memory that will never fade. Although not outwardly evident, like many things I do think that photobooths have a bit of hidden magic in them — and for years this magic has got me hooked.
So much so that around four weeks ago I spent almost $2,000 to go see a photobooth exhibition in Melbourne called “Auto-Photo: A Life in Portraits.” I had no idea what I was going into; I saw a few images of the displays and there went two months worth of my savings. I didn’t expect to feel so moved by a collection of media which turned out to be one of the best experiences I’ve ever had. The exhibition had a compilation of film clips, poetry, artworks, and photobooth strips that reflected on the significance of the analogue machine, but more directly celebrated the life of Alan Adler.
Alan, who passed away last year, was the oldest and longest-serving photobooth technician in the world, maintaining a series of photobooths across Melbourne for over 50 years. The exhibition took me through Alan’s fascinating life, from his early years, to his international travels, to his experimentation with colour photobooths — although in his words “nothing will ever give the same quality photographs as the good old-fashioned black and white.”
I walked around for hours, looking over the thousands of Alan’s strips, reading excerpts from books and learning about the origins and development of the machine. I watched families, friends, and partners line up at the machine in the centre of the space, knowing that moments later they’d have a strip that reflected them exactly as they were in that moment: versions of themselves they’d never be again.
But what struck me most were the voices woven through the exhibition, fragments of testimony regarding photobooths that echoed my own feelings. I listened to Alan himself admit: “Sometimes a machine tells me that something’s wrong…there is a certain relationship with me and photobooths. Sometimes they do mysterious things.”
Such a simple line, yet it fully captures the intimacy between human and machine, as if these booths are not just mechanisms but companions with their own quiet personalities. I read poetry from around the world, a note from the UK that read, “when the strip has been processed and cleaned, it exists in the booth to be collected, loved and shared.”
I saw declarations from scholars, like Brian Meacham who likened the photobooth to cinema itself: “four successive frames of a sequence that together tell a story.” Even though they are frozen films, these strips remain alive with movement and narrative, of the people they reflect or the relationships they capture.
What stayed with me as I left the gallery wasn’t just the history or even Alan’s remarkable devotion, but the reminder that these machines hold something we’re always searching for: honesty. In a world of endless selfies and carefully-staged portraits, the photobooth in all that it is resists performance. It captures us mid-blink, half-smile, hair-astray and somehow that makes the image more true than the thousands of curated photos stored in my phone.
When asked about his thoughts on the permanence of photobooths Alan responded, “I think they’ll last indefinitely… because the quality of the photographs is absolutely unbeatable… and the fact that they never fade.” But the quality Adler is talking about here is not the lighting or the contrast, but the quiet truthfulness of the image — capturing a person exactly as they are in that moment, a small paper artifact reflecting a memory etched in permanence.
Of course, words can only go so far. To truly understand the allure of a photobooth, you have to step inside one yourself. Whether it’s the vintage 1960s machine at Manhattan Superbowl, the discreet corner-booth at the Ace Hotel, the ever-reliable Newtown Hotel, or the retro kiosk at the Soda Factory — each offers its own kind of magic.
I love photobooths more than anything in the world, and I know they can be expensive and hard to find and not mean as much to other people, but when I step into that box, for just a moment I am completely myself — no insecurities, no performance. It’s just me and the camera. A spec of my life, a version of myself that I’ll never be again, captured and given back to me in a matter of moments as a strip in my hands like magic. True, raw, rare. A complete original. Just like me. Just like you.
Contributed by Brian
