Do You Remember?? Photo Booths!!

I don’t remember the color ones but remember plenty of the the sepia B&W. I wonder if any of the B&W images held up over the decades or whether they’ve faded out.
 
Color or mono, there is a magic about them. So much magic is gone now. Lenses are perfect and for the most part boring. I think that's why we like the retro lenses and some wander off into analog photos. I think we miss the magic and the fun.
 
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There is at least one in Melbourne, which has moved around a bit. It is currently at Flinders Street train station in the City, and it, or one like it, was at Melbourne Central shopping centre in the 2000s. I used it once, with the ex-girlfriend I've written about in the Ex Girlfriends and Ex Boyfriends thread. However, we didn't kiss or get naked inside it!

Melbourne Central Ceiling by Archiver, on Flickr

Looking back through my older photos reminds me of the photographic simplicity of those days, when I went out with just one, maybe two small cameras, and was happy with their image quality. I still have the photo strip that we made that night, tucked in one of my memory boxes.
 
x-ray said:
I don’t remember the color ones but remember plenty of the the sepia B&W. I wonder if any of the B&W images held up over the decades or whether they’ve faded out.
Click to expand...
I have several photos made 50 years ago. They still look fine. The photos then were developed and fixed ( obviously ) through a chemical process. We obtained a wet stripe of four pictures, they dryed in our hand.
 
They are still "rent-able" (at least here in the New England area) for parties, weddings, back yard BBQ's etc. I was at a party where this was set up under a tent in the backyard and it went over well.

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Here's a recent article about a fantastic exhibition which I sadly just missed. It was of Melbourne's photo booth manager of 50 years, taking hundreds of test strips of himself. The images show him aging over the decades.

www.abc.net.au

For 50 years, Alan Adler had one job — to keep Melbourne's analogue photo booths alive

For 50 years and before his death earlier this year, Alan Adler worked alone to keep the historic Flinders Street Station photo booth up and running.
www.abc.net.au www.abc.net.au

It appears there were once 16 photo booths in Melbourne, all run by the same man. Now there are seven.

In hindsight, I wish I had gone to a photo booth with my first girlfriend. The photos would have been priceless to me.
 
Joao said:
I have several photos made 50 years ago. They still look fine. The photos then were developed and fixed ( obviously ) through a chemical process. We obtained a wet stripe of four pictures, they dryed in our hand.
Click to expand...
I knew they were wet processed but figured like stabilization processed prints there were probably a lot of residual chemicals remaining. I’m not sure if there was any kind of rinse or wash in those machines.
 
I think they are relatively popular in more niche places that we could frequent: Photo labs and artist communities.

In the last year I noted that some film labs actually put in service photochemical booths (Carmencita, Subblelab) and noticed one, maybe digital, in a Paris museum
 
x-ray said:
I knew they were wet processed but figured like stabilization processed prints there were probably a lot of residual chemicals remaining. I’m not sure if there was any kind of rinse or wash in those machines.
Click to expand...
I believe there was. We had to wait a few minutes before getting a dripping stripe of B&W ( brown and white ) images. The machine made a sequence of different noises before the photos were expelled. There was no water pipes connection, the water was probably in a reservour inside. The stripe of phots came out wet and smelly (fixer smell). The four photos were different, there were four sucessivev flashes .
Now the photoboots are digital, they print four samples of the same photo.(one flash)
Regards
Joao
 
x-ray said:
I don’t remember the color ones but remember plenty of the the sepia B&W. I wonder if any of the B&W images held up over the decades or whether they’ve faded out.
Click to expand...
A strip of photos from an album kept by one of my grandfather's cousins. She was born in 1893, so I'll guess that this strip is from the pre-WW1 time period, say 1910 - 1915 (not sure who the photo subject is, likely a friend or classmate).

In this vein, the direct-positive street photos from the early 20th Century that I inherited seem to be holding up as well.
~1900_067.jpg
 
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