There is a very unique relationship between photo booths and mobile phones, with the former inspiring the latter, which in turn revitalised an old concept.
How Did Photo Booths Inspire Mobile Phones And Selfie Culture?
The connection between mobile phones and photo booths is a unique one, as despite being quite different technologies, they both have inspired and revitalised each other and led to a culture of incredible photo booths for weddings, social, and corporate events.
Usually, the relationship is incorrectly characterised as the rise of mobile phones with cameras leading to a downturn in the number of traditional photo booths of the type Andy Warhol used to create prototypical selfies.
However, the genesis of mobile phones even having selfie cameras in the first place is a direct result of the popularity of photo booths, especially in a country where the booths were so popular they changed youth culture.
In Japan, particularly in major metropolitan areas, photo booths are a massive industry, one that became a mammoth cultural force in the mid-1990s due to the development of the semi-interactive Print Club machines and the birth of purikura culture.
In 1996, Print Club alone was considered to be the highest-grossing arcade game, despite not actually being a game, and the combination of self-expression, borders, and customisable stickers created an entire cottage industry of similar purikura machines, becoming a business worth over half a billion dollars within a year.
Other purikura machines, such as Neo Print and Puri Puri Campus released soon afterwards, but more importantly than this, mobile phones with front-facing cameras were released as early as the late 1990s in Japan, several years before the camera phone was popular at all in the rest of the world.
This allowed for the creation of selfies as well as some rudimentary purikura-type features, and its popularity in Japan led in no small part to the development of smartphone apps such as Instagram, which led to photo booths changing from rudimentary machines dispensing passport photographs to an event in themselves.
Purikura remains popular to this day in Japan, with Eggnam, the world’s largest photo booth studio, based in one of Osaka’s most popular boutique shopping centres.