Film Screening—Spirit of the Photobooth

Join ICP on the 100-year anniversary of the opening of the first photobooth studio for a special New York showing of Spirit of the Photobooth, a new documentary that explores the history of the photobooth and the resurgence of classic booths all around the world. 

After the screening, director Sam Anthony, Sharon Josepho, granddaughter of the Photobooth inventor, Anatol Josepho, Bre Conley Saxon, founder of Auto Photo, and Danielle Krasniqi, a photobooth operator and owner, will be joined for a Q&A led by by ICP Creative Director, David Campany.

Image: Movie still from Spirit of the Photobooth, written and direct by Sam Anthony

About the Film

"2026 is the hundredth birthday of the photobooth. A fixture on Main Street, in malls, in the back of bars and in railway stations for decades, this overlooked and unsung part of photographic history looked set to be erased by the advent of the smartphone and The Selfie. But, that’s not the whole story.

After all, who would pay and wait four minutes for self-portraits, when they could have as many as they like for free on their phone? For a while it didn’t look good for photobooths. The traditional analog booths, with their distinctive ‘real’ photographs were replaced by digital versions.

Thousands of the old analog booths were destroyed or stuck in barns and warehouses.

But 100 years after their invention, the ones that survived are now highly prized collectors items, using technology that has hardly changed and which still retains its old magic.

Long lines of Gen Z users snake around the block in the world’s hippest cities to use them. And ironically, it’s digital technology and social media—on the face of it the booth’s greatest challenges—that have helped save them. Influencers have supercharged the vintage appeal of photobooths, and digital natives desperate for experiential “realness” have rediscovered the charms of holding four black and white shots in their hand after squeezing into the booth, drawing the curtain, and giving their best self to the camera. And most of them heard about it from some of the world’s biggest online celebrities.

So now a new breed of ingenious photographic entrepreneurs have sprung up to service an insatiable demand. They scour the globe for old booths, restoring them to their former glory and spreading the word on Instagram and TikTok, because there’s money to be made: Big money.

Truth is, there always was. When immigrant and inventor Anatol Josepho first launched the booth on Broadway in New York City on September 21, 1926, huge crowds gathered immediately, and he sold the patent six months later for an offer he couldn’t refuse.

One hundred years later and the long lines have formed again, and the analog photobooth has never been hotter.

So this is a film about how and why that happened. The story of the singular man who changed the way we take portraits, and the photobooth’s unique role in everything from the art of 1920s surrealists and Andy Warhol decades later, to the democratization of portraiture which gave the marginalized and overlooked a platform for photography on their own terms.

Filmed all over the world, Spirit of the Photobooth is a social and cultural history as seen through the lens of the photobooth itself, and an account of photographic obsession that takes us to meet devotees in Australia, Europe, South Korea, and of course the United States.

And it all starts with Anatol Josepho and his invention. A classic and extraordinary rags-to-riches origin story." 

—Sam Anthony, Writer and Director of Spirit of the Photobooth

Image: Movie still from Spirit of the Photobooth, written and direct by Sam Anthony