ON a recent sunny but frigid morning, I strolled up Broadway through Times Square with Näkki Goranin, a visitor from Vermont making a pilgrimage through the swirling crowds and the sensory overload of all the signage. We stopped on the west side of Broadway between 51st and 52nd Streets. It looked nondescript to me, with the usual fast food, souvenir shop, gym and drugstore.
Rachel Risen, left, and Jessica Millspaugh in the photo booth at BB&R, on the Upper East Side, one of the bars with a coin-operated machine.
But Ms. Goranin, a photographer whose book “American Photobooth” (W. W. Norton) has just been published, declared it “a landmark in photo history.” Because, she said, in 1926, roughly where the gym is now, a Jewish inventor from Siberia named Anatol Josepho (shortened from Josephewitz) opened a photo-booth concession, the first Photomaton in the world.
An instant hit, the photo booth spread from this spot in Times Square to arcades, amusement parks, state fairs, bus depots and five-and-dimes around the country. Across eight decades it has recorded countless youthful frolics, loving kisses and inebriated indiscretions. Its popularity has survived the Depression, the vanishing of the old arcades and five-and-dimes and the proliferation of disposable, digital and cellphone cameras. Nick Montano, executive editor of the industry monthly Vending Times, estimates that there are still something like 10,000 booths around the country.
But the old-fashioned booths with their “dip ’n’ dunk” chemical developing process and breathless wait for the damp strip of black-and-white images to slide out are disappearing into scrapheaps or into the homes of collectors (Tim Burton and Quentin Tarantino among them), giving way to booths with digital, computerized equipment.
On the busy Broadway sidewalk, Ms. Goranin explained how it all began. Mr. Josepho was just one of many inventors striving to perfect a fully automated photo booth in the early 20th century, she said. He was born in 1894 and grew up in Omsk, Siberia, dreaming of the Wild West and learning to use a Brownie camera, which Eastman Kodak introduced in 1900. As a young man he roamed the globe, from Paris and Budapest to Shanghai, finally reaching the Wild West, or Hollywood anyway, in the mid-1920s, then hitchhiked cross-country with his photo-booth schematics. In New York City, he assembled the engineers and mechanics to build the first few Photomatons he unveiled at 1659 Broadway in the fall of 1926.
“When it first opened, there were people standing all the way around the block,” Ms. Goranin said. Mr. Josepho kept the Photomaton “studio,” as he called it, open 24 hours. In April 1927, Time magazine reported that 280,000 customers had entered his booths in the first six months. They spent 25 cents each to pose and then wait the eight minutes it took to process a strip of eight small photos. Among them was Gov. Al Smith, not the last political figure to step into a photo booth. In 1953, the newlyweds Jack and Jackie Kennedy took glowing self-portraits in one.
In the early years, Ms. Goranin said, using a photo booth was not quite the private affair it would become. At Photomaton, attendants in white smocks and gloves took patrons’ money, suggested poses, cut the strips into individual photos and sold extras like frames and color tinting. Curtains were added later, inviting romantic and sometimes risqué behavior.
Photomaton was such a sensation that in March 1927 a business consortium headed by Henry Morgenthau Sr., the former United States ambassador to Turkey and a founder of the American Red Cross, paid Mr. Josepho $1 million for the American rights. The deal made the front page of The New York Times.
Competitors soon sprang up. A few doors up from Mr. Josepho’s studio, at 1671 Broadway, a place called Photomovette appeared, followed over the years by Photomatic, Auto-Photo, the Photo-Strip Junior, Photo-Me and others. Some booths weren’t as automated as they seemed. In storage in Vermont, Ms. Goranin has an old booth in which a hidden employee would quickly develop the strips and push them out the slot to unsuspecting patrons.
Farther down Broadway, between 47th and 48th Streets, on a block now dominated by Morgan Stanley’s headquarters, the 3,000-seat Strand movie theater once stood. Two doors away, a Photomaton concession opened in 1932. It was run by a man named John Slack, and it was so popular that he kept a large extended family employed there through the Depression.
In the course of researching her book, Ms. Goranin tracked down Slack’s son, Jeffrey, on Long Island. He told her he had just thrown several decades’ worth of old photos, family business records and even camera lenses into a Dumpster.
read more at NYTimes.com
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