Photo booth fans chase down the vanishing machines: ‘Kissing inside one is really fun’

Holly Varah bartends at a dive in Port Townsend, Washington. Until this spring, she owned a photo booth. It was a private, almost confessional space, shut off from the bulk of the revelry in the bar’s side room. Soon after Varah bought the booth, someone directed her attention to its classic red curtains: the velvet drapes were short, coming down just above the hips of whoever sat in it, “so that you can’t get up to anything in there” – mainly sex or drugs. But Varah, who is 42, wanted her booth to be a space of indiscretion.

“I immediately put a long curtain in,” she said. For five years, the bar had a house policy: take a nude inside the booth and receive a token for another free round.

• A person takes a photo at the Classic Photo Booth warehouse event in Old Bridge, New Jersey, as part of the International Photobooth Convention in New York City, on 30 August 2025.

What is the most fun you can have in a film photo booth? Ask a room full of self-described “boothers” – those would be analog obsessives – and you will get a host of answers, only some of which are R-rated. (“Kissing inside of there is just really fun,” Varah said). Others are more innocent – or ridiculous. Jocelyn Dean, who worked as a photo booth technician in Portland, Oregon, once got proposed to as the flashbulbs went off (she said no). Kati Cleaver, who restores the machines in Chicago, took her engagement photos inside of one. When Justin Twaddell and his wife, Caitlin von Schmidt, had their son, Tom, 18 years ago, they brought the newborn to a booth near their home Greenfield, Massachusetts, for some of his first baby pictures. Every month since then, the family goes back for more film strips. It’s a ritual that continues even as Tom goes off to college this fall; luckily for them, he’s staying local.

• From left, Kati Cleaver’s and Hong Van’s photo booth strips taken at the Classic Photo Booth warehouse.

These boothers gathered in New York City over Labor Day weekend for the International Photobooth Convention: an annual event that floats through cities boasting a large concentration of booths – last year’s took place in London – and includes technical demos of the machines, artists talks and art workshops. On a hot Saturday afternoon, they piled into chartered buses and drove over the bridge to New Jersey’s Classic Photo Booth warehouse to test various models, some dating back to the 1940s. Longtime enthusiast Max Sverdlov has run his company, Classic Photo Booth, for over 30 years, refurbishing broken machines and selling them to interested buyers.

• The International Photobooth Convention. Maxim Sverdlov, 73, works on a photo booth transmission. Breanna Conley, founder of Autophoto, which runs the convention, takes a photo in one of the analog photo booths.

A film photo booth costs between $20,000 and $50,000, said Únies Gonzalez, a 29-year-old film lab manager from Houston, Texas. Gonzalez and her boss, Jessi Bowman, made the trip to New York hoping to buy one. Boothers say there are no film photo booths left in Texas – in fact, there are fewer than 200 left worldwide, according to Autophoto, the organization that runs the convention. “I take a trip each year to a place that has one, so I can document myself the way I feel most represented,” Gonzalez said. The Texans left the convention without securing a machine, but they met some sellers they plan to work with in the near future.

Booths used to be ubiquitous in arcades, bars and some European metro stations, but over the years the mid-century machines became relics, expensive to maintain as only a handful of people are qualified to work on them – and because film, ink and replacement parts are not cheap. Today, many venues have digital machines – you have probably noticed pop-ups at work holiday parties or wedding receptions – but those tend to produce sharper, less forgiving images than their film predecessors. “I don’t like photos of myself, but I love photo booths,” said Peter McDaniel, 45, from Chicago.

Emma Cooper, a 35-year-old from Los Angeles, makes a point to track down photo booths when she travels. It doesn’t always pan out. “I went all the way to Poland, and the booth was broken,” Cooper said. “Luckily, I headed to Berlin afterwards, which is so rich in photo booth culture.” (So-called “photoautomats” are spread all over the German city.)

Some enter the booths without a plan. Others, like artist Lexi Darlin’, 42, storyboard out their poses with the intensity of a film director. Others still bring props – or pets: Alice Christine Walker, a photographer and former technician in Portland, Oregon, once got an urgent call from a woman who was trying to take headshots of her chickens in a booth. The chickens were dark-colored and were not showing up on film. Walker adjusted the exposure and all was well.

• Lexi Darlin’, 42, Cincinnati, Ohio, takes photo booth photos at the Classic Photo Booth warehouse.

Why does Walker think photo booths are so special? “It’s private,” she said. “You can close the curtain, and it’s just you.” Except when there are chickens.

Press a button, take your pictures, wait for the printing: photo booths might seem simple to the uninitiated, but they are a feat of chemistry and engineering. Dean, who fielded the photo booth marriage proposal, remembers changing the chemicals of a photo booth at the Ace Hotel in Portland. A young boy watching nearby asked how it all worked. She began explaining the process, but stopped as she watched the kid’s eyes glaze over. “So then I said: ‘It’s magic!’ and he went: ‘Oooo, OK!’ I should have started with that,” Dean said.

• Únies Gonzalez, 29, poses in her photo booth strips.

Melissa Veerasammy, 28, and Raya Lieberman, 30, who traveled to the convention from Montreal and Portland respectively, met in college and formed a friendship one strip at a time. “I love the tangible memories that are created, and that you only have four shots,” Veerasammy said.

“There’s no negative – if you lose it, it’s gone,” Lieberman added. “And if you’re into them, you’re really into them. They’re a gathering place, and as soon as you’re in a booth together, you’re like a kid again.”

• Hannah Roddam-Kitt, 40, owner of the only analog photo booth in Portugal, looks at her friends’ photo strips.

But much like youth, a photo booth does not last forever. Even the most ardent devotees cannot keep every machine running. Varah, the Washington bartender, sold hers this spring. She needed to pay off credit card debt and could not afford costly repairs. “I hit the end of my run,” Varah said. “When the booth went on the truck, I felt the physical sensation of stress leaving my body.” And if she ever had the opportunity to buy another? “I would jump on it.”