There is a photograph in the Smithsonian of a woman standing alone in a wooden booth, peering into a lens. She doesn't know she's being watched — only that something is about to happen. Four strips will emerge. She will keep one. The rest will travel the world as souvenirs of a moment she almost didn't think about twice.
This was 1925. Anatol Josadaki, a Russian-born photographer working in New York, had just installed the first commercial photobooth on Broadway. Within weeks, the line stretched around the block. People came for the novelty. They stayed for something else entirely: the chance to be the subject of their own image, on their own terms, in four quiet seconds.
What followed was a century of cultural reinvention. Enlisted soldiers during WWII left strip after strip in their lockers as goodbye letters to people they might never see again. Teenagers in the 1950s pressed their faces together and laughed at the mechanical click. Wedding guests in the 2000s piled into open-air booths, and the prints became table decorations, fridge magnets, keepsakes that outlasted the marriage ceremony itself.
The photobooth survived film. It survived digital. It survived the internet, which should have killed everything nostalgic. Instead, it found new life in phone cases and Instagram hashtags, in museum retrospectives and high-end event design, in the kind of cultural staying power that no algorithm can manufacture.
And yet: there has never been a publication for it.
There are trade magazines for the rental industry. There are photography blogs that mention photobooths in passing. But nothing that treats the subject with the seriousness its history deserves — that examines the design evolution, profiles the artists who work in it, covers the events and the culture and the obsessive community that keeps it alive a century after a man named Anatol set up a booth on a Manhattan sidewalk.
This is The 1925 Club. A fortnightly dispatch for photobooth historians, event photographers, rental operators, design enthusiasts, and anyone who has ever stood in a booth alone and felt, for a moment, that they were exactly where they wanted to be.
We publish every other week. We do not chase clicks. We do not publish lists. We publish work that we are proud to have written and that you will be proud to have read.
Welcome to the club.