Automatic Art – Alan Adler’s Life In Photobooths

From Auto-Photo: A Life in Portraits

Running 16 photobooths for more than 50 years, Alan Adler created an archive of self-portraits that test the boundaries of identity and creativity

The history of photobooths can be traced back to the 1850s, when an unknown inventor came up with an idea for a ferrotype (or tintype) vending machine, which would dispense photographic plates in return for a coin. Similar technology went on show at Paris’ 1889 Exposition Universelle (where the Eiffel Tower also debuted), but photobooths as we now understand them arrived in 1925, when Anatol Josepho opened a ’Photomaton’ Studio in New York. Josepho believed that by removing photographers, photography could become “more available to the average working man”, and invented booths in which a camera shutter automatically released several times, the images were processed inside the machine, and a paper strip of portraits was produced. The Photomaton took off and by 1928 booths were appearing around the world.

Josepho’s aim, and the name he gave the Photomaton, both suggest automation but there are ghosts in the photobooth machine – human experts, needed to service and repair them. Melbourne/Naarm-based entrepreneur Alan Adler became one such expert in 1972, after buying two booths advertised in a local paper. They had been pitched as ’vending machines’ but Adler – who had disliked photography in school “because it was in the dark all the time” – took the plunge anyway. “On the first day there was trouble because the thermostat played up and the developer got very hot,” he says, in a discussion transcribed in a new book, Auto-Photo: A Life in Portraits. “The photos were all coming out white. I panicked. The guy I bought it from came out and adjusted the thermostat. That was my only lesson in how they worked. The rest I figured out.”

Adler ended up owning 16 machines across Melbourne, and his working days lasted from 7.30am to any time up to 9pm to keep them going. Some of the upkeep was routine, such as refilling papers and chemicals; other times he had to fix overheated capacitors and broken cameras, or even replace whole gearboxes. The photobooths were often vandalised too, which meant Adler needed to clean and disinfect them, or repair shattered screens and seats. He developed protective measures to mitigate the damage, suspending relay boxes so they simply swung when attacked, for example, or adding rubber stops to protect light chutes from kicked-open doors. He created so many hacks and modifications, in fact, that the machines became truly his own.

“I am forever finding Alan – he’s physically part of the machines”

– Christopher Sutherland, Metro-Auto-Photo

After servicing each model, Adler photographed himself to check it was working; he ended up running the photobooths for 50-plus years, and thus created a life in portraits. “He built up this incredible archive of images of himself over the years,” says Christopher Sutherland, who now runs Adler’s old booths with his partner Jessie Norman, under the name Metro-Auto-Photo. “He says he took these photos to test the machines, but yet he kept them.”

“Hoarding may be one angle of it,” explains Norman. “But I do feel a lot of it was his late wife, Lorraine. I think she was responsible for at least organising them all and putting them away in some sort of preservation. Because he would have taken 10 times more than what we have, so not all of them were kept. Theres only so many you can realistically find a reason to keep.”

Together, the images create a funny, poignant record. Adler was not a follower of fashion so his clothes remain the same for long stretches, yet the years inexorably pass. In many of the photographs he has his eyes closed, shielding them from the flash, in some shots he looks serious, in others he is goofing around. In one strip he sports a fake moustache. Members of his family – including cats – appear in a few images, photographed in machines that were in a very bad way, and that he had to take home to repair. The passage of time also unfolds through technical aspects of the medium, colour coming in – after Adler bought six or seven Prontophot booths – then quite literally fading. Adler never upgraded to digital, and in the book tells Sutherland and Norman to stick with monochrome. 

“Black-and-white was always more popular than colour,” he observes. “I suggest you just stick with the black-and-whites, rather than get involved in the colour, but that is up to you… The colour is far more corrosive, it just eats through everything.”

Sutherland and Norman got to know Adler in 2018 and the story of how they met is great; passport photographs went digital in Australia years ago, but Adler’s analogue booth in Flinders Street Station has remained popular, a spot for couples and friends to have fun and record themselves. Sutherland and Norman visited to mark their first date, and spotted a note taped to the booth stating it was going to be removed. Station managers had decided to move some barriers, and had given Adler just 10 days’ notice to take the machine away. The note included a phone number so Sutherland called it and decided to help. He launched a Facebook campaign to save the booth, which gathered so much support the City of Melbourne and its mayor stepped in. The photobooth ended up being relocated to another spot in Flinders Street Station, where it remains to this day.

From this auspicious beginning, Sutherland and Norman stayed in touch with Adler, intrigued by the man, his photobooths, and what turned out to be his huge cache of images. When Adler retired they took over the booths, and when they realised quite how many portraits he had taken, they gathered and scanned them. Sutherland and Norman’s work has helped make the book, Auto-Photo, and an exhibition which will take place next year. “The photographs were literally just in shoe boxes, or loose among other things,” says Sutherland. “I still find them now, wedged inside machines, because they were such a perfect medium to fold and use as a spacer or to screw in a part or something. I am forever finding Alan – he’s physically part of the machines.”

Getting to know Adler better, Sutherland and Norman eventually got to see his family photos; they expected to be shown holiday snaps, but what he brought out was a series of images, mostly by Lorraine, depicting him checking out photobooths around the world. There are Japanese photobooths, American photobooths, Brazilian photobooths; there is even a Chuck E Cheese photo ride, and the low-quality snap it produced. There is something humorous about these busman’s holidays, which are included in Auto-Photo, but they also testify to Adler’s love of the booths – and the hard graft of keeping his business alive. 

“Being in Australia [pre-internet], he had to be boots on the ground, researching what other people were doing,” says Norman. “The only time he went on holiday was to research these booths with his family.”

It is an interest that was perhaps practical rather than cultural. Auto-Photo was edited by photo historian Catlin Langford, and includes a fascinating history of photobooths written by her (drawn on in this article), plus an essay by artist and vernacular photography collector Patrick Pound, sketching out an artistic history of these machines, and their use by the Surrealists and others. But Adler is not particularly interested in this history, say Sutherland and Norman. When they mentioned the forthcoming exhibition, he said, “Great”, then asked after the booths; when they showed him photographs of them getting engaged – taken in the Flinders Street Station machine – he immediately checked the image reproduction. 

“Chris proposed in the booth, you can see my shocked face. Alan looked at the pictures and said, ’Oh, this is a rather good quality strip’,” laughs Norman. “It’s good, he keeps us in line [as they now service the booths]… He’s a man on an island, physically and mentally. I mean, he’s quite a solitary person. He does know the industry, and has friends in it, but he drove around all day servicing machines for decades. He spent a lot of his time just by himself, basically.” 

“Even the group discussion included in the book, it’s heavily edited because every few sentences he would ask how the machines are running,” agrees Langford. “And then compare the quality of the strips, saying, ’This one’s not as good’.”

Adler has become famous in Australia, and Auto-Photo came about when Daniel Boetker-Smith, director of Melbourne’s Centre for Contemporary Photography, got in touch with Sutherland and Norman. Originally the idea was for the book to launch at the same time as an exhibition but, with the CCP recently forced to move to a temporary space, the show will now be co-presented with RMIT University Gallery in 2025 – the centenary of the invention of the photobooth. Langford, former curator at the CCP, will curate the 2025 exhibition alongside editing the book; she particularly enjoyed the images with cats, she says, and was keen to zoom in and out, showing both particular images and something of the extent of Adler’s collection. She also spent hours working with the book designer, Clayton Walker, trying to put the images in chronological order.

Langford also wanted to untangle the history of photobooths in the publication, as it is a narrative that has gone under-researched – particularly the story of booths in Australia. “We wanted the book to be very accessible and dynamic and exciting for a general audience, but hopefully also, with my referenced essay, there’s a value for scholars too,” she says. The book and exhibition were supported by the Gordon Darling Foundation, a charitable organisation which supports visual arts in public institutions in Australia.

In short, there is wide interest in this project but despite this, and despite being photographed so many times, Adler somehow remains enigmatic. Photobooths were originally associated with passports and identity cards, but the sheer number of images render this logic absurd, suggesting the difficulty of pinning someone down, not the ability to fix identity. More enigmatic still are the questions of what these photographs meant to Adler, and what to make of this archive. Langford says Adler did not intend to make art but points out his images suggest creativity; technically he did not take any shots, and yet he is also the author.

“He was expressing himself,” she muses. “It’s so interesting that we think of photobooths as not having photographers, and yet so many people are drawn to play with them.”

Auto-Photo: A Life in Portraits is published by Centre for Contemporary Photography and Perimeter Editions, priced £26. ccp.org.au perimeterbooks.com