The Automatic Booths

The first Photomaton opened in New York in 1925: for 25 cents, eight portraits in eight minutes, no photographer required. Alone facing the lens, customers suddenly posed differently.

The first Photomaton opened in New York in 1925: for twenty-five cents, eight portraits in eight minutes, no photographer required. Inventor Anatol Josepho installed his automatic booth on Broadway; the success was immediate—hundreds of thousands of customers the first year. In 1927, he sold his patent for approximately one million dollars, a colossal sum for the time.

The novelty wasn't merely technical. Without an operator to judge the pose, the individual found themselves alone facing the lens—a situation that liberated grimaces, expression sequences, and intimate staging impossible before a professional photographer. Alone facing the lens, customers suddenly posed differently: the booth became a space of disinhibition.

This spontaneity would make the device's artistic fortune. The Surrealists exploited the strip sequences; Andy Warhol later made it a tool for repeated portraits. The Photomaton invented an automatic, cheap, and strangely free self-image—prefiguring selfies and digital filters, where one photographs oneself alone because no one watches, except the machine.