A Century in a Click: 100 Years of the Photobooth

We all know the sounds of a photo booth - the familiar swoosh of the curtain rail, the clattering of the spinning stool, and the clunk of the flash…four of them, one after another.

Hidden away in the corner of a railway station or shopping centre, for generations the photobooth has been a space for people to experiment with the image they want to present to the world. A place to explore identity.

As the photobooth marks its centenary, presenter and oral historian Alan Dein considers the machine’s role - from novelty attraction to apparatus of the state to cultural icon.

Along the way he meets art historian and curator, Taous Dahmani at The Photographer’s Gallery; digital archivists Tim Garrett and Brian Meacham who run the obsessively encyclopedic Photobooth.net; and Professor Tom Levin, cultural theorist at Princeton University and collector of coin-slot ephemera.

Alan steps into the secluded AutoFoto workshop, where founders Corinne Quin and Rafael Hortala-Vallve restore and maintain their collection of mid-century analogue booths.

And Alan can’t resist popping into a booth or two along the way - experimenting with filters, frames and props at a Korean studio or noticing the subtly menacing CCTV cameras inside supermarket booths.

Together, Alan and his guests reveal how this humble machine invented by a Siberian immigrant has captured fleeting moments, private identities and a century of social change.

Presenter - Alan Dein
Producer - Katie Hill
Executive Producer - Jeremy Grange

An Overcoat Media production for BBC Radio 4