Róza Tekla Szilágyi: What initially drew you to explore the world of photo booths and the work of photo booth technicians?

Jen Grasso: Jen: I bought a photobooth in 2015, but my interest in photo booths goes back to when I studied photography in New York City and one of my first assignments was to take a self-portrait in a photo booth. It instantly charmed me, and I continued to use that booth with friends and family throughout my time in NY. Following that, I spent almost a decade in Berlin. Berlin has the largest concentration of photo booths in the world. At the time, I was not aware that this was as rare as it was, and I continued the love affair. I moved to Brighton at the beginning of 2014 and didn't know why there were no booths and thought, well, this is a perfect place for them. I started doing my research, which led me to purchase one which I operated and maintained for six years. 

The mechanics in these machines are temperamental on the best of days – and my machine broke down. It was something beyond what I was capable of fixing. I had to understand that this was the limitation of my skill set in working with booths. The only person I could see ever handing off my booth to was someone who had the same kind of ethos as I did, and that was Marco. And it's important to add here that he was one of the few people that regularly and willingly offered to help me troubleshoot throughout my time as a tech, so the ownership of the booth was transferred to Marco. 

During COVID, most of us were all subject to the same fate, we all had to shut our booths down, because most of them are located in hospitality or retail venues. Mine was located in the back of a vintage store. And at that time, I was retraining as an archivist and was working on an oral history collection. It was just very powerful for me as a record keeper, as someone who's interested in culture and heritage to hear first-person testimonials about such a variety of topics in these interviews. I knew nothing about anybody in the photo booth community, I wanted to learn more, so I began the Tech Project and Marco was my first interviewee.

And Marco, how did you get into photo booths?

Marco Ferrari: My perspective is slightly different as a European because, in Europe, photo booths were always used for ID purposes. And when the ID requirements changed everyone switched to digital. Almost no company kept the old machines because they didn't think they were going to come back into fashion. So in the mid-2000s, I realized that they were all gone. 

Before, I remember using them as a teenager with friends when we started to go out. When I realized the booths were all gone I felt something was missing. So I started to travel wherever I could find some – I did projects in Berlin, Paris, and Helsinki. And randomly every time and everywhere I would find a technician and I would ask them for a photo. And those were the very first ones that I got in my collection.

Then I purchased the latest version of an analog photo booth in 2009 and I kept it in a garage back in Italy. Meanwhile, we moved to Toronto – then to London where there were already photo booths. I used them a lot and I started working for the guy who owned them because he knew I had one in Italy and I was interested. Fast forward to 2019 when I met Alan Adler in Melbourne, who I think was 87 years old. He was one of the oldest technicians that was still working – and he gave me one of his test shots. And I thought:  “Oh, this could be interesting to collect and swap test photos with other technicians.” So I started reaching out – mainly on Instagram – to everyone I knew in the community to swap a test photo. 

Later with Jen, we made the decision to do interviews too. We found a lot of technicians on Instagram, but then there were also some random finds. For example, I found a business card from a guy in Minnesota. As I searched for his name, a person with the same name came up. So I contacted him and it was the same guy that started operating photo booths as a young kid because his father had a photo booth. So we found him and it was one of those magical moments because he has very interesting stories and an insight into the past – a past from which a lot of it is lost. After all, none of the big companies preserve archives or stories and the technicians were always behind the scenes and their stories were never told or saved. That's always the problem.

So I've been working now with photo booths for the past 10 years. And it's been my main job for 7 years now.

Marco, do you still have the first machine that you bought back in 2009?

Marco Ferrari: It was the last iteration of the analog photo booths meant to produce more photos shortening the way between each photo strip. But everyone hated that machine as it was very complex and often broke down. It was a color machine and there was no more supply of the particular type of paper and chemistry that I would need to make it run. But I kept it because every analogue photobooth is worth saving. After so many years of having it in storage, I have an idea to use it with positive paper, but it may be a project for another time. 

How big is this community of photo booth technicians? Surely you've talked to a lot of people, so you might have an estimate – because this is a profession that's vanishing. 

Marco Ferrari: During a photo convention in London it was estimated by all the participants that there are 300 active photobooths. Not all of them were working, but everyone put down the number they had, some were in storage, some were wrecked, and some were active. I'd say the number of techs still in this profession is less than 80 individuals. Because in some places there's a concentration of machines with fewer techs, when a lot of times I would say there's a lot of people that have maybe one or two machines and they are independently doing it. But now there has been a consolidation in the way of machines being passed from, especially in the US, from guys covering larger areas because in the US they kept them alive in bars, and shopping malls, whereas in Europe they were all gone after the switch to digital.

In our previous correspondence, you mentioned that you're working on a community archive that includes oral histories and a photo collection. I'd love to hear more about this part of your project. It seems quite possible that you may be among the last to have access to both relevant materials and an active network connected to this profession.

Jen Grasso: I should probably say that we have always called it a community archive project. As an archivist, I'm acutely aware of what a definition of an archive is. The impetus of community archives is that they are collections created by the community for the community. There are no formal records about photo booths that exist anywhere in the world aside from national archives, things like records of patents, financial records, records of articles of incorporation. And for us, it was about the people, the techs, and we wanted to collect their oral histories.

The main part of the project are semi-structured oral histories that are simple enough for those who don’t speak English or have little time, but open-ended enough to let stories emerge. Some interviews are not in English and we’ve had these translated -what is important is to hear from the tech’s themselves in their own words. Paired with the interviews is Marco’s collection of technician test strips and occasionally we also get ephemera like business cards or newspapers, and this is both analogue and digital. Whenever we can we always request physical copies because the idea is that we would like to deposit this somewhere someday.

In terms of what we are looking for: anybody who has ever worked with a technician, anybody who's ever worked with a photo booth, we would love to hear about your experience because there is no record of these experiences anywhere else. We don't know how people got into it. There are some people who have inherited booths, some people who picked it up haphazardly, there are some people who have actively sought out being a technician to work with photo booths. There are some people who say it's a family business. All of this is interesting to us. Any pictures of any format or any ephemera are interesting to us to add to the collection because there are only a handful of documents floating around and they are in the possession of only a handful of people. 

I reached out numerous times to Photo-Me. I will probably never be able to get access to employee records or training manuals, or get an understanding of how the business was operated. We have to rely on these oral history testimonies to explain how people got into the business, and how they learned because it was a very different structure than it is today. Technicians of the past had been trained, they had a line manager. If you couldn't fix your booth, there was someone that you could call. You could send your booth to a factory and it could get another one back to you so you could have repairs done and that doesn’t exist these days. 

Marco Ferrari: While servicing the photo booths you meet people. One time I met a guy who remembered going with his mother as a kid to service the photo booths. And there were different tiers of technicians, meaning his mother was only topping up chemicals with water and cleaning the machine. And if anything more was wrong, she was referring to maybe an IR technician who was covering a larger area. But then we have never heard about them, unfortunately. I think there are still a lot of people out there with connections to photobooth technicians but we don’t know how to reach them. Maybe they're a bit older and they don't see what we do because our reach is not as big. And a lot of times we don't have enough information, like for example, we don't know what ID photography was in South America.

Jen Grasso: Exactly, we have no one from the global South aside from Australia. But there's no way that photographs never made it to South America. There's no way that they've never made it to certain countries.

Through your work – recording oral histories, conducting field visits, and studying the evolution of photo booth machines – have you had the chance to map out which factories produced what? How familiar are you with the international history of photo booth manufacturing? Would you say that the industrial or mechanical history of photo booths has been a particular area of interest for you?

Jen Grasso: We absolutely have an interest, but it is not easy research. The history of the modern photo booth from the American perspective was mostly covered by Nakki Goranin’s book titled American Photobooth. We have had names of CEOs – names that the technicians gave us – but it is very hard if you cannot go personally or without knowing local authority records, or being able to go directly to the source. 

We know that Photo-Me is based in England. They still have a factory. But as they are a private company their records are not public. They have declined any form of comment. So you have to find information where you can. 

Would we like to know more? Absolutely. I would love to know more about where things were manufactured, where these companies were based, what happened to all of these parts, whether there were discrepancies between them, and where the chemistry and paper was produced. 

Marco Ferrari: And I think the European story was, again, different from the US. In the US we know when those companies stopped operating. A lot of the workers actually bought machines and areas after. And we know stories of people selling areas and routes to each other. I don't think that happened in Europe because it was, again, so focused on ID photography. But we don't know, we were never able to actually get in touch with anyone who worked in one of the offices or on a corporate level in Europe. So we don't know what the inner workings were apart from what some of the techs told us.

It seems almost impossible to put together the history because it's not available. So it also adds to the importance of what you do. The whole photo booth history is really tied together with the history of machinery and governmental decisions. Taking into consideration the history of the photo booth, was it always true that it was a piece of more democratic and more available machinery to take your photographs with? Or did that change during history?

Jen Grasso: Interesting question. I would probably have to do a bit more research on prices, and on first person accounts to be able to then calculate the scale of inflation. 

I know that when the first booths came out in 1926, portrait studios in New York City were not prohibitively expensive. It's not like photography in the late 1800s, it's not that it was only for a certain class or type of person – by the time that you get to the 1920s, photography had advanced so much and was accessible to everyday people. 

I think it's a more interesting question when you get to the Auto-Photo booths, postwar that could have seven strips developed at once. At that point, you essentially could get more done and give more people access to using booths. 

Before the war started in Ukraine, there was only one paper specifically made for photobooths, and it was more sensitive than any other dark room paper. The supply then stopped and everyone had to scrape for solutions and alternatives and everything was more expensive and the costs went up a bit.

What is the earliest photographic material you were able to acquire or access during the course of this project?

Marco Ferrari: It's photos of the young Alan, I think, in Australia. One of the photographs is from 1972 and the other one from 1977. He has been working with photobooths for 50 years – and was kind enough to send some of his oldest auto sweeps. I think that's the oldest. 

During your research, what is the most unusual or memorable story you’ve heard from a photo booth technician? Is there a particular story that, to you, really captures what it's like to be in that role?

Marco Ferrari: An older technician called Tim mentioned there were meetups of photobooth operators in the US. And it kind of goes into the fact that there was mob activity involved, because I think the photos could have been a way to launder money. And so there was some strange activity going on, especially on the East Coast and in Chicago. The idea of mob and criminality involved in the photobooth business was new to us. 

Jen Grasso: The one that sticks with me the most is probably the one from the same technician, Tim. He mentioned that it was through this involvement with the mob, color photo booths were brought to the US.

Are you currently engaged in any projects or collaborations that you’d like to share? Is there anything upcoming that you’d like the public to know about?

Marco Ferrari: Jen taught me that an archive is never complete. We have photos of people who never gave us a release or never answered our interview questions. But also there's a lot of new people coming up, new machines appearing, for example, in Asia. And it's always changing, companies are expanding in the US or are training more people. We always keep in touch when a new technician pops up, but we usually wait at least one year before interviewing anyone because we think it's a good amount of time to have stories.
We have created the first iteration of the project, a limited edition artist book, but this is only the beginning. We have more material to share, there are more techs to be interviewed, and I have many strips from people, mostly from Serbia, who never signed releases because we don’t know who they are.

Jen Grasso: I think with regards specifically to the project we're working on finalizing some kind of visualization to celebrate the upcoming centenary of the photo booth – there is a convention that has been announced in New York to celebrate it among many other events. But I think another bit of it is always trying to keep on top of these new people, new technicians, new booths, where they are put, making sure people know that we value them and we value their voices. I mean, it's very easy to message someone on a social media platform and say: “Hi, would you like to be part of the project?” It's much harder to convince them that there is value in their voice and their experiences. We are always thinking about where we can insert ourselves in the conversation or just remind people how we are still here, that we still want to hear from them. We may be working on a physical product to display the fruits of our labour of the past few years, but the archive is by no means finished.

I think technicians are very concerned. It's a business. It's a livelihood. And they're trying to make things run and compete with the filters and the Instagrams of the world. For us, it's very much about the person, about their voice, about what they bring to it.