For 50 years, Alan Adler had one job – to keep Melbourne's analogue photo booths alive

Australia Broadcast Center

a day ago

It was on Broadway in New York City, in 1925, when a man named Anatol Josepho patented and operated the first coin-operated self-printing public photo booth.
Back then, the cubical machines that people entered to enjoy a few minutes of privacy, covered by drapery on one side, did not have a "specific usage".
A hundred years later, their numbers faded amid digitisation with only approximately 200 operating photo booths left in the world.
Melbourne is home to seven of them, thanks to a man called Alan.
At a gallery space in Melbourne, attached to white four-metre-high walls, hundreds of photo strips of a smiling man with wavy hair line the horizon like a pixelated timeline.
As you follow on, the man ages, skin steadily wrinkling, but his grin remains.
Ms Langford said the exhibition "Auto-Photo: A Life in Portraits" celebrates the life of Alan Adler who, for decades, was the sole keeper of Melbourne's analogue photo booths — notably the one on Flinders Street.
The exhibition zooms into Alan's life through black and white, and sometimes coloured, snaps and photo strips.
Alan, who died earlier this year aged 92, would start work at 6:30am to check his photo booths, printing hundreds of his own photo strips as a part of a test run.
"Alan Adler's archive [is] where … hundreds of strips show him aging across 50 years. So, we've had to hang every single one of those individually," Ms Langford, who has been working on the exhibition for more than a year, said.
Ms Langford said she was one of the "fortunate" few who has met Alan in person to talk and write about his story.
A book that shares the name of the exhibition has also been published to honour Alan's life and the individuals around him who have committed to keeping Melbourne's photo-booth tradition alive.
The publisher of the book, Perimeter Editions, told the ABC 1,500 copies have been sold in Australia and internationally so far.
In the lead up to the exhibition, work has been busy for Chris Sutherland and Jess Norman, who are the current custodians of Melbourne's seven working photo booths.
The exhibition involved reviving what was left of Melbourne's operating photo booths, years of mentorship with Alan himself, and compiling a collection of photo strips dating back from up to 50 years ago.
Ms Norman and Mr Sutherland said they gave up their nine-to-five jobs to continue Alan's business venture and "wouldn't have it any other way".
Ms Norman said at his peak, Alan ran a total of 16 photo booths all by himself.
"It's a mammoth task," she said.
Mr Sutherland said Alan would have been doing the same job for decades alone, even after the industry started to dwindle.
"This exhibition was celebrating the man behind the curtain … the man that made all that happen."
One of the goals of the exhibition, Ms Norman said, was to reunite "lost strips" to their real owners.
There have been about 250 unclaimed photo strips found over the years, which are on display at the exhibition.
Nine out of 10 times, strips are left because patrons may have forgotten their photo strips on the strip holder, or the photo booth encounters an issue.
"There's a couple of hundred moving parts within the machine … for something that's 50 years old, on the odd occasion something can go wrong."
The couple said people can claim their long-lost photographs after the exhibition ends.
"They will need to contact us and then we will contact them for the retrieval of their strips and proof that it is them," Ms Norman said.
Ms Langford believes Melbourne's photo booth culture will live on for more decades to come.
In a progressively digital world, she said photo strips are mementos that offer a sense of tangibility.
"It's a very one-off moment that's kind of held forever."
Auto-Photo: A Life in Portraits is an exhibition by the Centre of Contemporary Photography (CCP) and is held at the RMIT Gallery until August 16.