Ah, the photo booth. That little thin strip of three images is a perfect souvenir of a fun night out, recording hilarity and tipsiness in a format prized for its Polaroidesque fragility: You lose it and you forever lose the image.
In the old days, you’d pile into a tiny chamber to make funny faces; nowadays the booth can be an elaborate room or retrofitted VW bus filled with a zillion props to grab in between the camera countdown. The photo booth has become such a part of our culture that it’s no surprise that Photomatica, a local company that builds photo booths, restores old ones and provides event rentals, just opened a vintage photo booth museum in San Francisco.
The Photo Booth Museum is in a storefront at 2275 Market Street and celebrated its grand opening yesterday. It’s open daily from 11am to 7pm . The museum’s painted exterior boasts that you can get an “X-tra wide analog photo strip” inside (the cost ranges from $6.50 to $7.50, but entry is free). There’s one photo booth that dates to the 1930s, which is a little mind-blowing to think about how long people have been doing these ephemeral and sweet photo sessions. That particular booth is not quite operational, but you can sit bathed in its vintage yellow light for a selfie. A video on Photomatica’s Instagram page shows the interior mechanics of what they call America’s oldest publicly operating analog photo booth, which takes four images in a curtained booth with a single stool: A machine literally dips the strip in toner and other chemical booths in its own bespoke darkroom.
An earlier iteration of the museum was Club Photomatica which opened in the Haight in August, a brick-and-mortar store with a handful of booths.
There’s something very flattering about the black-and-white analog images, so get your poses ready and stop by. As the company’s social media tagline says, its “$7 photos are better than your $1,000 iPhone.”