How people fell in love with old-school photo booths

LOS ANGELES

- Lydia Spencer-Elliott, The Independent

Five days before | turned 28, | cut my long hair into a short dark bob. Ithad been a tumultuous year: A young family member died suddenly.

The boyfriend | would have married let me down. Then my body gave out, leaving me in hospital for a week and regaining my strength from emergency surgery for many months afterwards. | felt changed — and there was only one place | wanted to commemorate the metamorphosis: behind the curtain of an old-fashioned photo booth. So, | perched on the creaky stool and smiled, having survived it all.

Photo booths were first launched into the world on the streets of New York in 1925 by Russian immigrant Anatol Josepho. The invention, which turns 100 this year, was immediately a success. Yet, despite its popularity and gorgeous film quality, the analogue booths were replaced by digital alternatives in the late 80s and, gradually, disappeared entirely. It’s only through the dedication of fans of the medium that they've begun to creep back onto the streets of cities including London, Paris, Barcelona and Florence over the past 10 years — much to the delight of millennials and Gen Z, who are embracing the antiques most fervently.

Twenty-six-year-old Ella Hodson was living in Montmartre, Paris when she fell in love with photo booths. There was one near her flat on Rue des Trois-Frères and each time she had a visitor or hung out with her friends in the city, she'd pull back the curtain and climb inside. Unlike an edited selfie or filtered Instagram post, she felt the snapshot authentically captured her and her friends as they were on that day, without curation or hundreds of takes. “It was just a really nice way to make a memory,” she says. “It was always dead on that road. Nobody even went down there. Every time I've gone back since, it's had a huge queue outside.”