Find out why the portents of doom surrounding photo booths a decade ago not only proved to be very wrong but led to a golden age of event-based booth hires.
Why Have Photo Booths Endured For Over A Century?
From their invention in 1925 to their widespread proliferation and installations in 1927, photo booths have been a common fixture on high streets, at weddings and at major corporate events, and there is nothing to suggest they will not be around for another century.
Despite early portents of doom that the rise of social media would doom them to almost complete obsolescence outside of photographic ID, photo booths have become more desirable than ever, and it is hard to find a major event which does not have one to climb in or pose in front of.
Why is this the case? There are quite a few reasons, but the more ironic is that the technology expected to eradicate the photo booth arguably became the reason why they endure and thrive to this day.
The rise of the cameraphone in the mid-2000s and especially the rise of social media platforms such as Instagram led to a strong belief that the era of the photo booth was coming to an end, but ultimately it created the perfect environment for them to thrive, albeit with a slightly revised purpose.
Historically, photo booths were the only way for many people to reliably take spontaneous and personal photographs of themselves; the critically acclaimed film Amelie explores this personal connection as the core of its whimsically bizarre story.
With selfies becoming a major form of self-expression available at any time and with infinite attempts to take the perfect shot, the belief was that the photo booth had become redundant as a way to capture authentically spontaneous moments, but in the end, it turned out the opposite was true.
In some respects, social media was a victim of its own success; the initial goal of spontaneous, meaningfully authentic photographs very quickly fell to the wayside in favour of a photographic style carefully curated to look as good as possible, often relying on filters and sometimes outright editing.
This meant that there was a place once again for authentic but high-quality photography, and the photo booth was right there to fulfil that need, as it has for over a century.