His life was filled with strangers’ photos. Yours might be among them

The photograph as souvenir is a logical extension of the pressed flower - poet Susan Stewart.

A hundred years ago in New York City, a Siberian immigrant named Anatol Josepho unveiled his new machine: the Photomaton: an enclosed curtained booth where, for just 25¢, the user could have their photo taken by a machine and delivered right into their hand in eight minutes. Years in development, with a pre-history too long for me to get into here, Josepho’s invention was a wild success, with people lining up around the block.

Two years later, he sold the patent and future royalties for $1 million, and moved to Los Angeles. He made other inventions, but nothing that so captured a populace hungry to see themselves, and hungry to be seen. By the 1940s, there were upwards of 30,000 black-and-white photobooths in the United States alone, boosted by soldiers getting photos of their sweethearts to take away to war.

Anatol Josepho and his wife, Ganna, with his Photomaton invention.Credit: Bettmann Archive/Getty Images

Today, the original analog machines are rare. The number fluctuates but I have it on good authority that there are only 200 to 400 left globally. You can blame technology, the digital creep. They don’t make the photographic paper any more, and the machines are difficult to maintain, but there remains a coterie of diehards keeping the photobooth dream alive.

A photobooth hypothetical: let’s say it happened sometime between now and the past 50 years in Melbourne. You were with friends, or you were solo; you were drinking, larking, or you needed a representation of your likeness for some official purpose. But the image got crunched or swallowed, or maybe the four-minute wait felt like 50, so you walked.

You might have thought that moment in time was lost forever. But as part of his daily rounds, Alan Adler, owner/operator of said photobooths – who at one point was running 16 booths across the city – would have recovered your strip and added it to his shoebox (he was not one for throwing things out).

Adler died in December last year, aged 92, and those lost strips – along with the machines and history – were passed to the new owners, Jessie Norman and Chris Sutherland, operating as Metro-Auto-Photo. Now your lost strip – part of the hoard – might be getting a public airing. Think of it like a treasure hunt of vernacular photography – wouldn’t you want to see it?

Alan Adler with Chris Sutherland and Jessie Norman at the Flinders Street photobooth in September 2023.Credit: Luis Ascui

The origin story of how Norman and Sutherland met Adler and became his friends/preservers/torch-taker-uppers is in the book Auto-Photo: A Life in Portraits, (Perimeter Books, 2024). Made in collaboration with Daniel Boetker-Smith, director of the Centre for Contemporary Photography, and curator Catlin Langford, the text celebrates Adler’s legacy, and features 50 years of his test strips, revealing the man behind the machines.

Alan Adler, Photobooth portraits, gelatin silver prints.Credit: © Alan Adler/Metro Auto Photo

Auto-Photo: a Life in Portraits, the exhibition, further explores the photobooth as significant cultural object in playful and immersive ways. The original plan was for the exhibition and book to happen at the same time, but fate (well, funding cuts) intervened, and the team had to rethink.

This delay has meant that the show must go on without its star, lending a more elegiac tone to the enterprise. Norman and Sutherland et al are consoled by the fact that Adler was present for the book launch, and able to have his time to shine.

Sutherland says: “He tried to pretend that he didn’t like the attention – he was quite solitary – he had a whole life of only dealing with complaints and issues and then thanks to social media, he finally got a chance to be appreciated.”

While there is plenty of Adler in the exhibition – “thousands of his faces,” Langford says, “these little strips … as well as his face three metres high” – Auto-Photo also pulls focus on people who used his photobooths “to create art or to create memory”, like writer Julie Mac, who, answering a public call-out, came armed with photo albums of her Sharpie mates from the 1970s, and Nicky Makin, who, Langford says, “was taking photos in the ’80s and colouring them … they look like A-ha video clips”.

Nicky Makin, Photobooth portrait, c.1980s, gelatin silver print with yellow ink (detail).Credit: © Nicky Makin

Langford, who is currently undertaking a PhD on the history of photobooths in Australia, talks about a 1929 newspaper series that asked members of the public to submit their strips showing six different emotions: “These amazing images of Australians, with, like, flapper hair, were published. It showed that people were really excited by this invention. Straight away, people saw the performative potential of it.”

On this, Adler is a case in point. Although his photos were tests, the private nature of them brought out different aspects of his personality: we have grimaces and goofy grins, eyes rolling or screwed shut. In some shots, taken at home, he has a mannequin in shot, or his cat on his lap, like subversive beats in the everyday workaday ongoingness of his reality.

Alan Adler, Photobooth portraits, c-type prints.Credit: © Alan Adler/Metro Auto Photo

The photobooth has always been a magnet for artistic play and expression. Art critic Jonathan Jones writes about the surrealist artists Andre Breton, Max Ernst and Salvador Dali as early adopters. The machine exemplified the concept of the “readymade”: it “removed the conscious, controlling mind of the photographer and took a stream of images too quickly for the sitter to compose her or himself in any but the most basic ways …”

Ruth O’Leary, Photobooth strip, c.2010s, gelatin silver print.Credit: © Ruth O’Leary

In the 1960s, Andy Warhol’s early experiments in photography and repetition utilised the photobooth. He appreciated the monochrome, uniform aesthetic, their ease and convenience. “Isn’t life a series of images that change as they repeat themselves?”

Like many Melburnians, I have my own photobooth memories. As a young adult in the 1990s, asserting an identity distinct from my suburban upbringing, a photo strip felt talismanic. It was a kind of proof, a way of claiming some small part of the city, and the wider world. There was something about the ritual of the process, the known steps, the tangible result, that felt significant. I was borrowing from popular culture, from the way photo strips were used in films, especially as totems of romance and remembrance. I still have a handful of them (I am also not one for throwing things out).

Norman and Sutherland’s Instagram archive, @flindersphotobooth, posts strips sent in by the public. Norman says: “We get hundreds of messages throughout the year: ‘This is me and my wife in 1974’. They’ve made an account just to DM me, and they’ve had that photo in their wallet all that time. Or ‘This is the last picture of my brother before he passed away’. It’s a real roller-coaster ride of emotion. I always try and send the happy ones to Chris.” Both speak of the photograph-as-object as part of the attraction.

“If you’re under 30, your whole life is intangible,” says Sutherland. “The reality is a lot of people don’t have physical photos of their family and friends any more so that’s why there’s something [about analog photography] that really connects.”

Katherine Griffiths, Photobooth Beginnings, Chadstone, 1974, gelatin silver print (detail).Credit: © Katherine Griffiths

I’m curious about generational relationships to nostalgia. For those who remember the time before selfies, this exhibition will mean one thing, for later generations, something else. I wonder about the concept of “borrowed nostalgia”. Marketers like to say that Gen Z, despite being true digital natives, have an intense longing for real-world connections, as well as a keen bullshit radar and a desire to find things without the false help of the algorithm gods. Considering this, it makes sense that Adler’s “reveal” was borne of social media, its stew of visual culture, digital communication, public interest (and pride) a modern form of collective consciousness.

At the photobooth installed at RMIT for the duration of the exhibition, I watched a steady stream of young people going in and coming out, waiting the wait, excited. And then it was my turn. I remembered the half-curtain, the swivelling too-small seat (happily, the machine accepted cards). It was over in seconds. I felt faintly exposed in a way I never did back in the day – the whole doing-something-private-in-public thing. When I got home, I put the new photos against the old, and felt the pull of nostalgia, but also an appreciation for the fact that this was me now, as is, no retakes. I’ll make meaning of it later.

Auto Photo: A Life in Portraits is at RMIT Gallery, June 6-August 16.