Photo booths have been in the zeitgeist since the late 1800s. The first-ever working photo booth was made by French inventor T.E. Enjalbert in March 1889 and was presented later that same year at the World’s Fair in Paris. He named it the “Apparatus for Automatic Photography”. A similar machine was patented only a year later in America by photographer Mathew Steffens. These earlier versions were not as impressive as they thought they would be as they still required a lot of manpower (at least 20 people) and were not as efficient as they intended them to be.
The closest version of the photo booth we know today was invented by Anatol Marco Josepho in 1925. The coin-operated machine he called “Photomaton” was introduced on Broadway in New York. This version was used by more than 200,000 people, all of which waited patiently for 8 minutes while their photo strips developed. In the age of instant gratification we live in today, it’s hard to imagine that the 8 minutes felt magically quick back then.
Go back 100 years, here below is a set of amazing photos that shows portraits of women in the photo booths from the 1920s.
0 comments:
Post a Comment