8 Poses for 25 Cents

The first commercially successful photobooth was created by Anatol Josepho. It was placed in New York City on Broadway in 1925. It was an instant hit. In the first six months, 280,000 people stood in line to use the coin-operated, ten-minute photo machine. In American Photobooth by Näkki Goranin the history of the photobooth is recounted with pictures of its creation and use. Can’t get enough? Babbette Hines’ book, Photobooth, displays hundreds of pictures from the 1920s through the 1980s. The stylistic variation of the snapshot is continued in Photobooth:  The Art of the Automatic Portrait, by Raynal Pellicer, which shows not only the common man, but celebrities (like John Lennon, Elvis, Ginsberg and John F. Kennedy) using photobooths.