Helped by a preservation movement – you can find maps of the spread of photo booths across continents – a new generation has discovered the special mechanical magic of booths: the rotating stool for height adjustment, the countdown for getting your expression in order, the four-fold opportunity to come up with a winning grin, and the moments of expectation before the pictures are delivered. As with many mechanical inventions, what seemed obsolete again seems alive – photo booths on street corners once again encouraging a night-time queue. There is a retro appeal to the resulting pictures, but also an indelible quality; as Andy Warhol, the master of the cool vocabulary of photo booth images, observed: “The best thing about a picture is that it never changes even though the people in it do.”
