NEW YORK, NY.- On a recent Saturday afternoon, a group of four giddy young women dressed in miniskirts and baggy pants took turns cramming behind a brown curtain and into an apparatus three decades older than they were.
It was an analog photo booth from the 1970s, enclosed within a wood panel structure and nestled within a suitcase shop on Orchard Street on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. After they posed — making heart shapes with their hands, sticking out their tongues, putting their arms around one another — the four women huddled by the booth and waited three minutes for a black-and-white photo strip to develop.
They had arrived in the city hours earlier on a Peter Pan bus from Philadelphia, where they are seniors at the University of Pennsylvania. The photo booth was their main destination.
“I know all the cute photo spots,” said Tracy Zhang, 21, whose friends credited her with scouting the location. A line of about a dozen people trailed behind them.
Old Friend Photobooth, as a sign affixed to the front identifies it, is owned and operated by Zoë Lazerson and Brandon Minton. In June, they introduced the street-accessible photo booth to New York City, where analog photo booths had previously only been inside bars and businesses, according to a website that tracks photo booths around the world.
The throwback to analog is resonating particularly with members of a younger generation who often feel nostalgic for a time they never experienced. They have flocked to vinyl albums, CDs and photos taken by disposable cameras — physical media that some say forces them to slow down and be present.
At the Old Friend, taking dozens of photos at a time to get that one perfect shot is impossible, and there’s no way to edit out flaws.
“I’m like very critical of the whole photo-taking culture at this point,” said Maddie Feldman, 20, who was at the booth with two fellow Princeton University sophomores. “I get a little dystopian about that.”
Feldman said she had inherited four film cameras from her grandmother and found an affinity for the process of developing photographs the old-fashioned way. She also keeps a Google Maps list of analog photo booths — most of which she has learned about from videos on TikTok and Instagram.
“People like to work for their food, like lobsters and crabs,” Feldman said. “I prefer to work for my photos.”
Lazerson, 27, and Minton, 25, who are dating, share her enthusiasm. They have been drawn to photo booths since they met in October 2022 on a night out in Salt Lake City. They went to their first one together on a visit to the Whitney Museum two weeks after they started dating. (Minton keeps a frame from that strip in his wallet.)
When they moved to New York in August 2023 they started batting around the idea of buying their own photo booth. Minton, a freelance photographer who had worked in a film lab in Los Angeles for three years, started making some phone calls.
Eventually, he got in touch with a former photo booth technician in St. Louis who had acquired several booths decades ago and had sold all but one. Minton and Lazerson, an influencer, purchased that last one, which hadn’t been used for 20 years. They persuaded the owner of a luggage store to rent them about 15 square feet of space for the old machine.
At first, it gave them trouble: The paper kept jamming, there were issues with the strobes, the camera broke. And since many of these parts are no longer made, it has been a complicated journey to maintain the photochemical photo booth. They’ve had to shut it down multiple times.
“Now, thankfully, it’s a smooth-running machine,” Minton said.
People who go into the photo booth have four chances to pose for the camera. After tapping a credit card for payment inside the booth — each strip costs $8 — the three flash units go off quite abruptly. Sometimes, the unexpected leads to funny outcomes.
In the first shot that Jane Biedermann and Jaeger Lajewski took that afternoon, their hands are crisscrossed for a blurry, chaotic photo.
“It makes it that much more endearing,” said Biedermann, a 22-year-old student at LIM College in Manhattan. “You don’t really know what to expect,” she said, but added that the black-and-white style seemed to lend a flattering look.
“It feels new because we’re not used to these analog-type photos and experience,” said Anita Yu, a 20-year-old student from Tokyo who was visiting New York with her friends Mana Nakagaichi and Nari Culos.
Yu and her friends weren’t total novices, though. They have also been exploring other older forms of capturing photos, they said. Yu whipped out a green film camera from the knee pocket of her loose cargo jeans, Nakagaichi rummaged inside her tote to find a silver digital camera and Culos pulled out a disposable one from her mini shoulder bag.
“It’s cool to think that this is how our parents took their photos,” Nakagaichi said.
Zoë McLean, 33, and her mother, Ibby Archer, stumbled upon the booth while walking around the area for a girls’ day out.
“I remember when they originally were around — maybe one larger town might have one at roller rinks and bowling alleys,” said Archer, 73, reminiscing on her childhood in the 1960s and ’70s. “But it was a big deal to have instant gratification.” (Back then, three minutes was “instant.”)
Bhavisha Vala, a client manager at Chanel, and Ellie Turner, a communications officer at a university, both 30 and from London, have a mission to visit every analog photo booth in the world. They have taken photos at booths in Barcelona, Spain, Paris, Berlin and Prague.
They started taking them in 2013 when they met at the University of Leeds, and they tend to look back at their old photos and reminisce.
“As we look back on our photos, we are like, ‘Oh, this is an old friend,’” Lazerson said.
With the growing popularity of the photo booth, Lazerson and Minton are looking to relocate. They want the keys to their own place so that they can bring their other ideas to life, including curating a collection of furniture and hosting block parties. Wherever they end up, they plan to keep the booth street-accessible so that anyone can walk up to it and climb in without having to go through a shop.
“It’s a dying art form,” Lazerson said. “There’s a community of people that want to keep it alive. And we’re along for the ride.”
This article originally appeared in
The New York Times.
