W hat if I told you there was a magical box you could step into in which you could reinvent yourself and take your identity into your own hands? You walk past such boxes all the time, without ever noticing their psychic sorcery. If the humble photobooth does not seem an obvious topic for a radio show about social history, use your imagination and cast your mind back a hundred years, to when Anatol Josepho’s “Photomaton” first hit New York. The technology was an instant success: for 25 cents a pop, ordinary New Yorkers could enter these new automatic photobooths, trusting a mysterious machine to capture their likeness and leaving with a freshly printed strip of personal portraits.
A Century in a Click is an ode to the romance of the photobooth – its intimacy, its power, its influence on how we see ourselves. “Anything can happen when you walk into this machine,” we are told in a tone of breathless wonder. Against a soundscape of mechanical whirring and shutter-snap clacks, the oral historian Alan Dein traces his own life through headshots taken behind the magician’s curtain. With guests from the worlds of art and academia, he explores why we are so keen to perform for this photographer-less camera.
In the era of the selfie, we are used to carrying around thousands of photos locked away on our phones. Yet the photobooth is seeing a resurgence. There are the old analogue machines, lovingly restored by afficionados like a duo in a Hackney workshop who lament that, due to Russia’s war with Ukraine, they can no longer source the special honeycomb paper that brings traditional photos to life. Then there’s the modern iteration: a Korean-inspired digital photobooth experience full of colourful props and filters. Does it lose its charm when subjects are able to select and repose their pictures before printing? Or is it still an act of empowerment, agency and self-expression to take a snapshot of ourselves that lives on beyond our screens? Either way, Photomaton’s slogan “Just Picture Yourself” rings as true now as it did 100 years ago.
A Century in a Click
BBC Radio 4
[Further reading: Ringo Starr’s Long, Long Road]
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This article appears in the 06 May 2026 issue of the New Statesman, Tis but a scratch
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